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Mary JSoon Lee: Monstrosity

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GOODKIND

Nationally bestselling author of The Sword of Truth series

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Praise for the Sword of Truth series

“A phenomenal fantasy, endlessly inventive,
that surely marks the commencement of
one of the major careers in the genre.”

— Piers Anthony

“Goodkind delivers a rousing, original,
and rewarding story.”

— Science Fiction Chronicle

“I really think it’s going to sweep the
country as Tolkien’s work did in the sixties.’^
— Marion Zimmer Bradley f

Coming In October TEMPLE OF THE WINDS

THE MAGAZINE OF

August • 48th Year of Publication

NOVELETS

THE EDGE OF THE BED
OF FOREVER

Jonathan Lethem
and Angus MacDonald

HOOKS, NETS, AND TIME

139

Linda Nagata

SHORT STORIES

MONSTROSITY

Mary Soon Lee

ORLEANS, RHEIMS,
FRICTION: FIRE

Kathe Koja

and Barry N. Malzberg

HALLS OF BURNING

Jake West

THE GREEN MAN

Rand B. Lee

MOSQUITO LEAGUE

Michael Libling

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

108

Michael A. Martin

MUSTARD SEED

129

Mark Bourne

DEPARTMENTS

THE INFINITE CAREER

Jack Williamson

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

Charles de Lint

BOOKS

Elizabeth Hand

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

Gordon Van Gelder

FILMS

Kathi Maio

SCIENCE:

THE SCIENCE OF INVISIBILITY

121

Pat Murphy
and Paul Doherty

CARTOONS: Benita Epstein 129, 160); Bill Long (63, 96); S. Harris (120, 128); John Jonik (138).
COVER BY THOMAS CANTY FOR "MONSTROSITY."

EDWARD L. FERMAN, Publisher GORDON VAN GELDER, Editor

CHERYL CASS, Circulation Manager AUDREY FERMAN, Assistant Publisher

ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction (ISSN 0024-984X), Volume 93, No. 2, Whole No. 554, August
1997, Published monthly except for a combined October/November issue by Mercury Press, Inc. at $2.95
per copy. Annual subscription $33.97; S38.97 outside of the U.S. (Canadian subscribers: please remit in
U.S. dollars.) Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, 143 Cream Hill Rd., West
Cornwall, CT 06796. Publication office, 143 Cream Hill Rd., West Cornwall, CT 06796. Periodical
postage paid at West Cornwall, CT 06796, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S. A. Copyright
© 1997 by Mercury Press, Inc. All rights, including translations into other languages, reserved.

GENERAL OFFICE: 143 CREAM HILL RD., WEST CORNWALL, CT 06796
EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 1806, MADISON SQUARE STATION, NEW YORK, NY 10159

The Infinite Career

JACK WILLIAMSON

Arthur ciarke

once told me that
if I lived another
twenty years, I
could live forever. That was some-
thing like forty years ago. We're
both still alive and writing. People
ask how we do it. I don't share his
secrets, and I've never had any mas-
ter plan for my own immortality.
I've never been able to see much
beyond the novel in progress. Yet,
with my own first story published
in 1928, 1 still enjoy life and work.
I've been wondering if there is any-
thing I might try to explain.

First of all, thanks are due my
parents for good genes. My father
lived to age ninety-six, active to the
end and with a lively interest in the
world. I owe a good deal to modern
medicine. Looking back, I recall
times enough when sheer chance
and more times when my own
stupidities might have done me in
with a different fall of the dice.
I've been helped by a lot of gener-
ous friends, as well as a remark-

able run of great good luck.

I enjoy writing. For me, it has
always filled an urgent need. The
eldest sibling, I grew up on isolated
farms and ranches, taught at home
through the first few years, or more
often allowed to teach myself by
reading. With no social life, I turned
to my own imagination, a habit I
have never tried to break.

When I was about to begin
analysis at the Menninger Clinic
back in 1936, one of the psycholo-
gists suggested that writing fantasy
was a symptom that analysis might
relieve. Nothing I wanted, of course;
it became one more problem for my
own analyst, Charles W. Tidd, who
came to understand me more hu-
manely.

Half my life is still lived in
fantasy. My recent novel. Demon
Moon, was invented to brighten the
tedium of long flights and long bus
rides and long nights in strange hotel
rooms on a tour of China. I'm far
happier when I have a story going
than when I don't.

THE INFINITE CAREER

The writer's first need, of
course, is some command of lan-
guage and the craft. Though En-
glish is my only tongue. I've picked
up smatterings of half a dozen oth-
ers and learned linguistics enough
to sharpen my perspective on lan-
guage in general. The best way to
learn, I think, is to teach. A profes-
sor of English for a good many years.
I've taught grammar and linguis-
tics and my share of freshman comp
— and generally enjoyed it, though
reading too many papers can be-
come a chore.

The craft has always been a
challenge. Home from the South
Pacific after World War II, I found
so many bright new writers pub-
lishing bright new fiction in bright
new magazines that my own career
seemed about to end. I spent the
middle fifties writing a comic strip
for the New York Sunday News,
and went back to college when it
expired.

Armed with degrees in English,
I returned to Portales in 1960 to
teach at Eastern New Mexico Uni-
versity, my hometown school. I had
five comp classes through the first
year or two. A deadly stint, but the
college is small and people came to
trust me. I was presently allowed to
teach a panorama of courses that
ranged from types of lit and the

history of literary criticism to mod-
em linguistics and one of the early
academic courses in science fiction.

Hard work, but I enjoyed my
students, my colleagues, and the
chance to learn. Best of all was a
course in literary figures that en-
abled me to collect a shelf of works
and criticism and spend a semester
with one or two great writers. We
ranged from Melville and Mark
Twain to Faulker and Hemingway,
to James Joyce and Ibsen, to Tolstoy
and Dostoievsky. Joyce was my fa-
vorite; I visited his martello tower
in Dublin and looked for his grave
in Zurich. I can't claim that I mas-
tered his art, or any other, but surely
I was learning something.

Courses in film and modem
mystery fiction were on the list
before I retired. I rented classic films
for a historic survey, discussed cin-
ematography, bought an 8 mm cam-
era and film for it. The students
were divided into teams that wrote
and produced their own short films.
I enjoyed it. The class seemed to. I
think we all learned something.

My wife and I used to travel
every summer. I've seen all the con-
tinents and learned what I could of
the histories and cultures of Russia
and China, stories more fascinating
than any fiction and good grist for
more.

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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

With little time or energy left
for writing, I did manage to stay in
print through those college years,
thanks to foreign sales, collabora-
tions with Jim Gvmn and Fred Pohl,
and what I could write during sum-
mers and breaks. Retired as overage
in 1977 — rd turned sixty-nine, and
I wanted to teach another year — I
was once again a full-time writer.

Early in the game, when I re-
garded a story as a magical mass of
words on paper, I tried desperately
to master the magic. My model was
Max Brand — a pen name of
Frederick Faust, who published fine
pulp fiction under a score of names.
He was reputed to write 4000 words
a day and sell them in first draft. I
tried to follow his examples, and in
fact did sell a good many of the
stories.

Trying to make a system of
authorship, I learned Leo Margules'
formula for the Thrilling group, but
formulas are no fun. I set up a file of
ideas for plot, character, setting, story
ideas. The file became a graveyard.
Nothingthat went into it ever came
out again. The stories I sold came
from ideas never hoarded; they had
stayed alive and grown in my mind.

The greatest lesson I've ever
learned is simply that technique is
not enough. Language and tech-
nique are merely useful tools that

enable you to say whatever you
want to say, to share emotion and
experience worth sharing. If the
story doesn't matter to you, it won't
matter to the reader.

My most successful novel has
been The Humanoids, written after
I got home from the Northern
Solomons in 1 945, where I had been
forecasting tropical weather for
Marine air groups. Before the war,
most science fiction had been opti-
mistic about the advance of tech-
nology and the human future. The
atomic bomb cast its mushroom
shadow over that.

My humanoids were man-
shaped robots created in the after-
math of a terrible war, designed by
men of good will to prevent an-
other. They obey the Prime Direc-
tive, "To serve and obey, and guard
man from harm." The complica-
tion is that they do it too well. Our
best-meant technology, so the story
says, can trip us. Though I myself
was and am a hard-pressed optimist
a story must be free to speak for
itself.

Interests keep shifting, and
most of my stories have come out of
what concerned me at the time.
Theories of history once obsessed
me. I read several volumes of Arnold
Toynbee's vast Study of History.
He saw cultures as giant organisms

THE INFINITE CAREER

that mature, age, and die.
"Breakown'' and Star Bridge, writ-
ten with Jim Gunn, grew out of that
notion.

Walter Prescott Webb outlined
a more hopeful theory in The Great
Frontier. His great frontier lay in
the Americas and other new lands
opened by the voyages of da Gama,
Columbus, and Magellan. Their
opening let Europeans escape their
restrictive home societies to de-
velop democracy in politics, Prot-
estantism in religion, and private
capitalism. In The Starchild Tril-
ogy, with Fred Pohl, we opened our
own future frontiers in space.

The idea of genetic engineering
has excited me ever since I read
Wells' First Men in the Moon and
Huxley's Brave New World. The
New Collegiate and the OED have
promised to give me credit for in-
troducing the term in the epigraph
to Dragon's Island. That appeared
in 1951, a few years before Watson
and Crick broke the genetic code.
Later, as the actual science ad-
vanced, I returned to the idea in
Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods
and again in Firechild.

The OED has also given me
credit for inventing "terraforming, "
a word for the art of transforming
new planets for human habitation,
in Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock.

By great good luck, 1 was with
the press at NASA in Pasadena for
most of the Voyager flybys. The
Voyager is a wonderful robot, which
made us vicarious explorers of the
solar system. We cruised by the
major planets and close to icy moons
that had never been more than
points of light in telescopes. Our
guides were the teams of scientists
who presented and discussed the
findings, day by day.

A thrilling experience for the sf
writer. I learned about the Oort
Cloud, the swarm of dirty snow-
balls that become comets when they
drift near the sun, and found two
novels there, Lifeburst and
Mazeway. Later, after a tour of the
unfinished Biosphere, I wrote
Beachhead, a novel about the first
flight to Mars and the effort to build
a habitat and plant a colony.

The idea for The Singers of Time
came from Stephen Hawking, who
has the imagination of a top-rank
science fiction writer. Reading his
Brief History of Time, Fred Pohl
and I decided to set a novel in his
expanded universe.

Beyond the solar system, the
frontiers of astronomers and cos-
mology are expanding faster than
the universe. The Black Sun came
from the mysteries of the galaxies
in motion. They spin faster than

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

the gravitation of their visible stars
could make them spin. Much of
their matter must be dark. Its na-
ture is not yet known, but in the
novel a quantum-driven spacecraft
lands on the frozen planet of a dead
sun, which no longer shines.

The Silicon Dagger, still in
progress, springs from concerns
closer to home. Out of discontent
with current politics, I voted Liber-
tarian in the last election and re-
solved to write a Libertarian novel.
The Oklahoma City bomb and the
militants on TV crystallized the
idea. It's set in a nearly contempo-
rary Kentucky county inhabited by
people who declare and defend their
independence.

Even a short story must have a
reason to be. "The Fractal Man," in
VB Tech, expands on an article in
Scientific American suggesting that
other space-time universes may be
as numerous as the stars in our
own. "The Hole in the World, " com-
ing up in FetlSF, was done in a writ-
ing class I taught with my colleague,
Patrice Caldwell. "The Story Roger

Never Told," to appear in an an-
thology in honor of Zelazny, came
from knowinghim and teachinghis
work.

One great attraction of science
fiction has always been its freedom.
There are no taboos. You can say
nearly anything you like, so long as
you can hold the reader's interest.
That takes skill but also empathy.
That's a sense for the feelings of
others, the feelings of your charac-
ters, the gift for sharing those feel-
ings with the reader.

Fred Pohl has said that writers
share themselves. I think it's true,
and perhaps the final secret of a
long career. A good story becomes a
bridge of identity, a way of sharing
emotion and the illusion of signifi-
cant experience between writer,
character, and reader. Or so it seems
to me.

In spite of all the contrary evi-
dence that keeps piling up year by
year, I'd like to hope that Arthur
Clarke was right. Even if he wasn't,
it has been a great game. I mean to
keep at it as long as I can.

Maiy Soon Lee's last appearance in these pages was one of her SF stories,
''Universal Grammar," just a few months ago. Now she proves herself to he
equally adept with fantasy. The gentle tale that follows grew out of the writing
workshop that she attends in Pittsburgh, where she lives.

Monstrosity

By Mary Soon Lee

SEAGULL FLEW THROUGH

Fera's dreams all that night. Its wings
stirred the air over her head; its cry stirred
a yearning she could not name.

Fera woke with that yearning, a wild, irrational thing that she thrust
aside impatiently. Today would be as yesterday, and the day before, and
the many years before that. Wishing wouldn't change that. She stood up
from her bed, her claws clicking on the marble floor. Standing hurt her
back. After a minute, she sank down onto four legs and padded into the
bathroom.

Gold and silver fittings winked at her in the winter sunlight. The
mosaic floor showed lilies and yellow roses, and the amethyst of the royal
insignia. Only in the cobwebbed splinters of the fractured mirror did Fera
see ugliness. She made herself stare at her shaggy, brutish reflection, as
she had every day but the first — that long-ago day when she had tom
through the castle, saliva slobbering down the matted fur of her face as she
yowled in madness.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Fera twisted the tap on with one awkward paw, and bent forward to
let the water stream over her head. The chill water braced her, but
something was wrong, an emptiness lurking inside her. With dripping wet
fur, she paced out to the garden. Snow crusted the lawn, iced every twig
and branch, frosted the edges of the winding paths.

At her coming, the birds flew away, calling out warnings to each
other: Alarm! Alarm! The monster approaches!

Fera stalked across the snowy lawn, her damp fur clotting with frost
in the piercing cold. She understood the birds' speech, and every warning
call bit into her, hard though she tried to ignore them. But there was one
friend who would listen to her without running away. She left the garden
and entered the wood where Wolf lived.

"Wolf!" called Fera, her tail wagging in anticipation.

No answer.

"Wolf!" Still no answer. Fera stopped and sniffed the wind, scenting
for Wolf. There, to the east. But there was another smell too, a human
smell, and an iron undercurrent flavoring the air. Blood. She raced toward
the smells. Intruder: there was a human intruder.

She came to a glade where a silver-gray carcass lay gutted on the
ground, where an old man crouched over Wolf's body, the warm blood
coating his fingers, a knife in his hand.

The man had not heard her approach. In a great leap Fera knocked him
over. The knife dropped soundless into the snow. She opened her jaws over
the wrinkled folds of the old man's thin neck.

"Please," croaked the old man. "Spare me."

And Fera paused, her teeth dimpling his skin. Maybe because he didn't
struggle underneath her, maybe because it had been so long since a human
had spoken to her, she raised her head and let the old man free. She covered
the fallen knife with one heavy paw. "Why? Why should I spare you?"

The old man started as he heard her speak. He pushed himself into a
sitting position, shivering. "I beg your forgiveness. I lost my way in the
snowstorm. I was cold, I — "

"You trespassed on my lands and murdered my friend." Fera looked
at Wolf's still body. Her throat closed up, and she could not speak.

The old man fumbled and pulled a leather bag from under his coat. "I
have money I can give you in compensation — "

MONSTROSITY

Fera growled. "I don't want your money. You will come to my castle.
If you are civil company, I shall let you live. If not — " She bared her teeth.

"But my sons," said the old man, "my sons are waiting for me. They
will think me killed."

"I care not what they think," said Fera. With one claw, she ripped the
gold chain that was all she wore from around her neck. Gently, she laid the
chain on Wolf's open chest. Gently, she pressed her nose against his cold
nose, and for the last time breathed in his deep, comforting odor.

Then she turned to the old man and bared her teeth again. "To the
castle."

At supper that night, the old man sat at the opposite end of the
banquet table. His eyes widened as he studied the crystal goblets, the
green jade bowls resting on the jade plates. He didn't ask why the goblets
were empty, the plates bare of food.

"Supper," said Fera. The banquet hall darkened for a moment,
shadows appearing and disappearing in a heart's beat. When the light
steadied, soup steamed in the bowls, roast beef waited on the plates, and
raspberries and tangerines lay heaped beside jugs full of cream.

"That's a useful trick," the old man said dryly.

Fera grunted in reply. The old man was trying so hard not to show his
discomfort with her, nor surprise at his surroundings. He had said nothing
when he first entered the castle, but she had watched his gnarled fingers
rub at the silks and jeweled ornaments, as if he didn't quite believe they
were real.

Now she watched as he lifted his soup spoon and sipped at it. Lowering
her own head, she licked up the soup from her bowl. Over the rim of her
bowl, she eyed the old man. He looked at her, looked back at his soup,
looked at her again, and then picked up his bowl and drank from it directly.

Fera raised her head, soup dribbling down her chin. "I won't be
offended if you use the silverware."

"Perhaps not, but I'd feel awkward," said the old man. And when he'd
finished the soup, he picked the meat and vegetables up in his fingers.

Neither of them spoke again until the meal was over. Then the old
man said softly, "The wolf that I killed, could it speak too?"

"Aye." Fera stared fixedly at the white expanse of the tablecloth.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTIOxN

''I am sorry/' said the old man. "I would give much to undo that
slaying."

Fera looked up from the tablecloth and met his gaze. "I would know
your name."

"Petrov. And yours?"

"Fera."

"And your friend the wolf's?"

"I called him Wolf, nothing more." Silence fell between them
again.

The silence stretched into the second day, and the
third day, and the fourth, broken only when Fera ordered
supper, or Petrov asked a simple question — where the
towels were kept, or how he should clean his shirt.
They spent most of the time in the library. Fera paged clumsily
through book after book. Sometimes she was distracted by Petrov shifting
in his chair, and she would glare at him, all the more irritated if he was too
absorbed in his reading to notice. Sometimes she stared out the tall narrow
windows at the snow, remembering how Wolf tossed his head when he
was amused, the way the coarse hairs of his coat had shaded from red-
brown to silver-gray over the years.

On the fifth evening, Petrov looked up from a history book and asked
quietly, "When may I go home?"

Fera growled deep in her throat but said nothing.

Firelight played in the hearth behind Petrov. He looked old and
shrunken against the bright flames. "May I leave here in the spring?"

"No," said Fera. She gazed into the flames, seeing a silver-gray carcass
spread-eagled in the snow.

"May I leave in the summer?"

"No," said Fera. "You killed my companion. Now you will keep me
company."

Petrov raised his eyebrows. "Well, that makes perfect sense, seeing
how much pleasure you're deriving from my company."

His tone was dry, but when he turned back to his book something in
the set of his shoulders, in the way the lines pulled in around his eyes made
him look sad. Fera shook her head impatiently: why should she care how

MONSTROSITY

the old man felt? She picked up her own book, but her muscles ached, and
she couldn't find a comfortable position in the chair.

With a growl, she set the book down, "Do you play chess?"

Petrov nodded slowly.

"Will you play a game with me?"

Petrov nodded again. "I'd like that."

Fera showed him where the chess set was. Without any fuss Petrov set
the pieces up, his gnarled hands still better suited to the task than Fera's
paws. They played in silence, but Petrov smiled as he laid down his king
at the end. "Good game. Do I get a return match?"

And so they played another game, and played again the next day. A
week later they were varying chess with backgammon and cards; a week
after that they discovered a mutual interest in mathematical digressions.
On dry days they shared brief walks outside, Petrov cocooned in a
ridiculous abundance of scarves and sweaters. When it snowed they
wandered inside the castle.

Petrov liked to visit the art gallery on the second floor best. Each time
the paintings were different, save for the one at the end of the first hallway:
a portrait of a young girl with ivory-smooth skin, red lips curved in a smile,
gold-bright hair. Petrov often paused there, and raised his eyebrows in
question to Fera.

But the spell held Fera silent: she knew that once she had been the girl
in the portrait, but she could not speak of it, could not say anything of
her life before the curse was laid upon her.

In the third month of Petrov's stay, they were walking together in the
garden. The lawn was mostly clear of snow, the air full of smells and
growth and green. Fera sniffed busily, and pointed out the first crocuses,
not yet in bloom.

Petrov beamed, his mouth crinkling at the comers. He sat down on a
bench, and rubbed at his left knee. "Spring's my second favorite season.
Do you have a favorite?"

"Summer." Fera growled softly, remembering warm nights spent in
the woods, rolling over in the long sweet-scented grass.

"Summer's too hot and proud," said Petrov. "I liked it best when I was
a child. Then when I was a young man, I switched to preferring winter, just
because no one else liked it. My wife..." He stopped, and for a moment he

FANTASY 8*. SCIENCE FICTION

looked frail and lost. "'My wife liked autumn most, and now I do too, from
harvest through to first snow. Crisp apples, the colors of the leaves,
bonfire days. I remember her best in autumn."

Fera scowled, her insides knotting up. Petrov was unhappy and she,
she felt guilty. But she shouldn't — he was the trespasser, the murderer.
She thought of Wolf and tried to summon anger, but it twisted into grief.
"I'll be back soon."

She left Petrov alone, and ran for the cover of the trees. There in the
shadowy gloom, where the snow still lay on the ground, she paced back
and forth. She'd take Petrov to the gallery again this afternoon. He'd put
this mood behind him soon enough. She turned it over and over in her
mind, but it was useless. Guilt still ate at her.

Finally, furious with herself, she galloped back to Petrov. "Go," she
growled. A burning, prickling sensation tore at her insides. "You're free to
leave. Take what you need from the castle — boots, food."

"My thanks." Petrov stood up. His face was stiff, unreadable. He laid
one hand on her shaggy back. "I'll go home to my sons."

"Aye," said Fera. "Do that."

Petrov's hand tightened on her fur. "I'll miss you."

Fera stared at him, but none of what she wanted to say would emerge.
In the end, she just muttered, "Go."

"I'll come back," said Petrov.

"There's no need." Fera turned and walked away.

In the weeks after Petrov departed, Fera stayed in the woods. She ate
grubs and squirrels, mice and rabbits, taking fierce pleasure in their
squeals as she caught them, savoring the blood-scent as she trapped small
creatures in her claws.

She did not speak. She tried not to think in words. Words were sharp-
edged, the broken halves of conversations. At night she slept in the glade
with Wolf's body, by now a cage of bones open to the rain and wind, the
two of them silent.

Gradually she lost track of time. It might have been a month later, it
might have been two when she heard a distant clattering, the faint boom
of the bell at the gate to her grounds.

Petrov. Fera raced for the gates, muscles pumping the long mile till
she reached the iron gates.

MONSTROSITY

Outside stood a young, exquisitely handsome man. His full lips
curled in disgust as he looked at Fera, then altered to a forced smile. He
held out one smooth white hand in greeting. '"Good day, milady. My name
is Omegon, son of Petrov.'' He pulled his hand back after barely brushing
Fera's extended paw.

"Petrov's son/' said Fera, trying to keep the disappointment out of her
voice. "Come in."

"Why, thank you. I was passing by, and, since my father has told me
so much about you, I thought I should pass on his good wishes." Omegon
gestured behind him at a black horse and two saddlebags. "If you would
see that my belongings are taken care of."

Fera stepped toward the horse, and watched it skitter backward.
"Maybe Petrov forgot to mention that most animals are scared of me. You
will have to take the horse to the stables yourself."

"Very well," said Omegon, but two spots of high color stood out
beneath his elegant cheekbones, and Fera didn't like his peevish tone.
Indeed, apart from his appearance, she wasn't sure that she liked this
young man at all. But she thought of his father and tried to stay civil.

"The stables are over there," she said. "I'll be waiting for you at the
main entrance to the castle."

Ten minutes later, Omegon joined her at the castle doors. His mouth
opened to a red "O" as he took in the marble hallway rising to the wide
curve of the mahogany stairs. He swiveled his head to study the ornate
ceilings, the details picked out in gold and silver, the sculptures and
paintings, and the fifteen-foot tall crystal windows.

His delicate pink tongue licked his lips once. "I see my father did not
exaggerate the beauty of your castle." After a moment's hesitation, he
added, "Or of your gracious ladyship, of course."

Fera snorted before she could control herself. Petrov would never
have described her as beautiful: sturdy, maybe, or muscular. Recovering
some of her manners, she asked, "Have you journeyed far? Are you
hungry?"

"Two days' ride, and I confess I am a little hungry."

Fera led him to the dining hall. Her feet left muddy tracks on the floor,
and she was acutely aware that she must smell like a barnyard. She
noticed Omegon's nose wrinkle once or twice, but when he was seated at
the far end of the banquet table, he seemed to relax. Indeed his eyes

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

positively sparkled after Fera had said ''Dinner'" and the dishes had filled
with food. He took out a thin leather book from his pocket and flicked
through the pages.

"What is that?" asked Fera.

He flushed. "Nothing, just a hobby of mine. I, ah, study the lore of
enchantments."

"I've studied the. history of enchantments, too, though I have been
unable to find any texts that contain much more than hearsay." Fera
leaned forward in her eagerness, a chunk of meat dangling forgotten from
her claw. She caught a glimpse of the cover — illustrated with something
that looked like a frog — before Omegon thrust the book away.

"I'm sure my humble book wouldn't interest you, milady." His
knuckles whitened on his silverware, and he sliced one neat portion of
meat. He lifted the meat on his fork, and elegantly swallowed it. Taking
a sip of wine, he added, "Has anyone ever told your ladyship how eloquent
your eyes are?"

Fera snorted. "I wouldn't have guessed that Petrov would teach his
sons to be flatterers. Or did you come by it naturally?"

Omegon had the grace to look discomfited. "It's not, that is, I do
realize your ladyship's appearance is unusual. But there can be much
beauty in the unexpected."

Fera blinked. In the long-ago, men had whispered to her such sweet
things as this young man did. But now, now either he had too much wine,
or he was shortsighted, or he was a liar. She found herself hoping it was one
of the first two. Even if only for one evening, she would like to be able to
pretend that she was beautiful again.

Omegon stood up, and rested his arms on the back of his chair.
Smiling at her, he started to sing. "A flower in a garden, a jewel in a crown,
ten thousand look for beauty where they know it will be found."

His voice was pure and rich, taking the simple tune and giving it
depth. Fera closed her eyes and listened.

"A princess in a palace, a rainbow in the sky, let thousands look for
beauty where they know it will be found. But I would see the cactus
bloom, and I would see you smile, and know your love I'd found."

Warm, sweet breath wafted over her face. Fera opened her eyes just in
time to see Omegon lower his lips to hers, and she believed, yes, she

MONSTROSITY

believed that he loved her, as youth must surely sometimes love, wildly
and without rational cause.

For one moment his mouth pressed against hers, and then he stepped
backward, his expression darkening. "You look just the same!"

Fera touched her lips with the edge of one paw, probing the spot where
he had touched her. There was a huskiness to her voice that she didn't
recognize. "How else would I look?"

The young man sank into a chair, and buried his face in his hands.
"Beautiful, like a princess. My father was right. Tm nothing but a fool."

The thin book slipped onto the table, and Fera saw the title "On
Enchantments to Recover Ensorceled Princesses. From Frog Princesses to
Beasts."

She laughed, because anything else would have been too painful, and
because she had been as much of a fool as this young man. More so, since
she was old enough to know better. Not every curse can be lifted, even by
a young man's kiss. "At least," said Fera finally, "you sing well."

Face still hidden in his hands, Omegon muttered, "I am sorry, Fera,
for lying to you. I, I think I'd like to leave now."

And he ran from the hall without another word.

Fera waited for him at the main gate, the book clutched tight in one
paw. "I believe you forgot this."

"Thank you." He hesitated. "That song, my father made it up when
he came home. He thinks you found him too old and too boring. He thinks
that's why you sent him away, but he never stops talking about you, on
and on and on." The peevish note had returned to Omegon's voice, but
Fera barely noticed.

Something stirred in her, wildly and without rational cause. "Tell
him I miss him. Tell him I would like it if he came to visit."

And on a day in early summer, not so many weeks later, Petrov came
riding to the castle. His hair was gray and his skin was wrinkled, and his
knuckles were swollen with arthritis. But Fera found him beautiful
enough. And if, in the darkness of some night, they held each other close
for comfort, it is none of our concern.

Books To Look For

CHARLES DE LINT

OMETHING

a little different
this time. Usually
I pick the books
rll review for this column from
among all of those that show up in
my P.O. box throughout the month
up until my deadline. But this time
— simply as an exercise in forestall-
ing my own biases, if nothing else
— I decided to review the first three
books to come in after turning in
my last column (the deadline for
which was February 21st). The only
caveat was that they couldn't be
media-based or series books.

This isn't because I'm particu-
larly against either of the latter,
though I do have reservations with
them. What troubles me about me-
dia-based books is that there is no
character growth — there can't be.
If the character changes, the fran-
chise will no longer have its recog-
nizable icon for further books, mov-
ies, etc. So what normally propels a
novel is absent and we are left with
a story that is solely event-driven.

This can be entertaining, cer-
tainly, but I would be no more happy
with a steady diet of them than I
would be eating the same thing ev-
ery day.

Series books present another
problem. While they can have
character growth, too often they
begin with a bang, and then fizzle
out after a book or two. They might
have a great opening premise, an
extraordinary character, a fascinat-
ing new world, sometimes all of the
above, but the appeal is in the origi-
nality. Once familiarity sets in,
what seemed so fresh has become
old hat, and this reader, at least,
quickly grows tired. The series that
keep my interest are usually those
where the setting itself is the con-
tinuing thread (Norton's Witch-
world, Holdstock's Mythago Wood)
and the stories concern a new cast
each time out. When old faces reap-
pear, it's more often only as second-
ary characters.

Be that as it may, I don't think
any less of the authors writing either.

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

or of the readers who enjoy the end
result of that authorial labor. And
for our present purposes it struck
me as unfair to judge a series on
only one book, while let's face it,
the media-based material is going
to sell regardless of what any re-
viewer or critic might have to say
about them, and the point of this
column is to bring to your attention
something that you might other-
wise miss.

But I've digressed enough. Let's
have a look at those three books.

As She Climbed Across the
Table, by Jonathan Lethem,
Doubleday, 1997, $22.95

This is, without question, one
of the oddest books I've read in a
while. Two threads run through it.
In one, a physicist, while trying to
create a secondary universe, has
succeeded instead in making a hole
in this universe, a "Lack" through
which items can be passed, but not
reclaimed. The other thread con-
cerns the viewpoint character,
Philip Engstrand, a professor who
studies other professors, and his
obsessive fixation on Alice Coombs,
one of the physicists involved in
the Lack project. What Engstrand
has to deal with is that his erst-
while lover Coombs has left him

for her own obsessive fixation on
the Lack.

It's a great opening premise and
Lethem goes on to introduce a num-
ber of potentially fascinating char-
acters and humorous situations,
setting them up so that they should
bounce off each other like balls in a
pinball machine. Yet for all the po-
tential, the characters come off flat,
which in turn renders both the hu-
morous and more poignant mo-
ments less effective than they might
be. The characters' reactions are
distanced and cerebral — even in
what should be highly charged,
emotional situations — and while
this coolness says something about
contemporary society, and the mi-
crocosm of it as found in a univer-
sity setting, it grows tiresome expe-
riencing it at novel length.

The book's saving grace is the
fascinating discussion that arises
from time to time on the nature of
reality and the dynamics of couples,
but mostly I found the novel con-
fusing.

Or perhaps I simply didn't get it.

The Duke of Sumava, by Sarah
J. Wrench, Baen Books, 1997, $5.99

Set in Eastern Europe during
the Thirty Years War, The Duke of
Sumava initially appears to be part

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

of that subgenre of folklore in which
mortals make a deal with faerie
and/or the leader of the Wild Hunt.

Unhorsed and close to death in
the wild forest that makes up much
of his small dukedom of Sumava,
Duke Ottokar sends out a call for
help to anything that will listen.
Much to his surprise, his summon-
ing is answered by the leader of the
Wild Hunt, a faerie healer, and the
forest itself. The enemy is tempo-
rarily driven off and Ottokar is
healed of his wounds, but then
Ottokar realizes he might have
traded away his mortal soul in de-
fense of his beloved homeland. And
he still has two immense invading
armies to drive off.

At this point it seems rather
obvious what will happen next, but
happily the author proves more in-
ventive. Wrench quickly deals with
the '"sold one's soul to the devil"
plot line and, while much of the
book does concern Ottokar's
struggle to keep his country free
from outside invaders, the book's
overall focus is more on Ottokar's
interaction with Faerie — not
merely to solve his immediate prob-
lems, but over the long term.

In fact. The Duke of Sumava
doesn't read so much like a novel as
it does a fictional biography, which
is a good thing since Wrench's mat-

ter-of-fact prose style and fairly ba-
sic characterization lends itself well
to the latter. This isn't to say that
the book reads like some dry his-
torical treatise. There is much here
to engage the reader — a cumula-
tive effect of incidents and effects,
rather than a tightly focused single
plot thread — and Wrench also pre-
sents some intriguing takes on vari-
ous elements of folklore, religion,
and how her characters view them.

Three in Time: Classic Novels
of Time Travel, edited by Jack Dann,
Pamela Sargent George

Zebrowski, White Wolf, 1997,
$14.99

I'm a sucker for time travel
stories, from H.G. Wells, through
Jack Finney, to Terence Green's
Shadow of Ashland, discussed here
at this time last year. So I'm de-
lighted to see the first of this new
"Rediscovery" series of classic nov-
els from White Wolf focusing on
time travel. The omnibus features
three complete novels along with
introductions by the series editors
to give some background on the
authors and to help put the books in
context of the times when they were
originally published.

The lead offering is The Winds
of Time, by Chad Oliver, and at this

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

point I have to shamefully admit to
being unfamiliar with his work.
Judging by the quality of this novel,
Tm hard-pressed to understand how
I missed him when his books were
first coming out.

The Winds of Time is both a
time travel and a first contact novel.
While on a fishing vacation, Wes
Chase takes shelter in a cave only
to be kidnapped by a gaunt, white-
faced stranger who renders him
immobile with a stun gun. Chase is
dragged into a deeper part of the
cave, blocked off from the outside
world by a metal door with a com-
plex locking mechanism. There he
sees that his captor is not alone.
There are five niches carved out of
the stone wall of the cave, with
apparently sleeping figures in four
of them.

Over the course of his lengthy
captivity. Chase is forced to teach
his captor English and eventually
discovers that not only are the man
and his companions extraterrestri-
als, but they first arrived on this
planet over fifteen thousand years
ago. The story-within-a-story re-
lated by Chase's captor is a fasci-
nating read and makes for a nice
turnabout on the usual plot of an
earthman landing on some distant

planet peopled by primitives. Here,
our ancestors,are the primitives.

The Winds of Time has all the
ingredients of a solid sf novel: a
riveting story, quality prose, believ-
able characters, and solid extrapo-
lation of its scientific speculation.
And except for some quaint man-
nerisms of its protagonist, it's as
readable and immediate today as it
was when it was first published in
1957.

Published by itself, it would be
well worth picking up. When com-
bined with Wilson Tucker's classic
The Year of the Quiet Sun and Poul
Anderson's equally engrossing
There Will Be Time, as it is here,
the resulting omnibus is a treasure
trove of classic gems that unques-
tionably deserve to be rediscovered
by a new generation of readers.

Material to be considered for
review in this column should be
sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box
9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K 1 G
3V2.'=g'

To order these books, (24hrs, 365 days)
please call (800) 962-6651 (Ext. 9500)
or visit us at http://www.booksnow.com

Books

ELIZABETH HAND

Black Wine, by Candas Jane
Dorsey, Tor Books, $22.95

The Prestige, by Christopher
Priest, St. Martin's Press, $24.95

Burning Your Boats, The Col-
lected Short Stories of Angela
Carter, Henry Holt Company,
$30.00, Penguin Books, $14.00

ERIODICALLY,

like mournful wolves
in full cry at a moon
they can never bring
to bay, reviewers or academics will
lament the death of the Novel of
Ideas, that literary nostrum so be-
loved of the critical establishment.
In fact, the Novel of Ideas never
died; merely underwent the laser
surgery and verbal liposuction nec-
essary to transform it from a late
Victorian and early-twentieth-cen-
tury lady of manners — refined,
exquisitely put-together, and rather
(shhh!) dull — into her millenary
counterpart: sleek and sexually

savvy, sporting the elastic gear and
pop exuberance of science fiction,
her Higher Education safely hidden
beneath a veneer tattooed with the
century's intellectual watermarks:
Marxism, structuralism, feminism,
post-modernism.

It ain't news that when it comes
to acceptance (or even acknowledg-
ment) by the critical mainstream,
science fiction sucks hind tit (and
fantasy pretty much dies stillborn).
An exception is speculative fiction
willing to fight for a cause — what
cause doesn't really matter, so long
as the banner is colorful and held
high for all to see. 1984, The Dis-
possessed, The Left Hand of Dark-
ness, The Handmaid's Tale, Samuel
R. Delany's Neveryon books — all
are didactic novels given the impri-
matur "classic" and kept in print
by virtue of becoming part of that
ambiguous literary canon, novels
taught in high school and college
English classes. All are fine novels,
and 1 984 is one of the great books of
the century; but are they in fact

BOOKS

more deserving of attention than
The Book of the New Sun, Engine
Summer, Sarah Canary, The Course
of the Heart! What of Delany's bril-
liant, unfinished diptych that be-
gan with Stars in My Pocket Like
Grains of Sand! Or the linked no-
vellas Le Guin published as Four
Ways to Forgiveness!

Ah well. Acceptance into the
canon carries both reward and pun-
ishment — yesterday a young man
complained to me about having to
read The Fellowship of the Ring for
credit — and we should probably be
grateful that anyone is having ideas
these days, let alone writing about
them. Which brings me to Candas
Jane Dorsey's exceptional, and ex-
ceptionally ambitious, first novel,
Black Wine. It is a novel of ideas,
deftly woven and quite beautifully
written, very much in the mode of
Ursula Le Guin's early books, and
should not go begging for readers.

In a tirelessly anachronistic
future world that is probably our
own, an amnesiac woman named
Essa stitches together her own his-
tory from the fragments she recalls
of her earlier life, as well as those of
her mother, grandmother, and
daughter. Essa's history is intricate
— she is the fugitive daughter of the
melancholic queen of an unhappy
land where power runs through the

distaff line — and made even more
convoluted by her amnesia (nasty
fall from a dirigible, subsequent
clumsy trepanning, and finally some
decent laser surgery), which results
in the creation of a secondary per-
sonality named Fierce-frightened.
Fierce-frightened is a slave, not be-
cause her nature is slavish (now,
that might have been a nice trope
on Sybil], but because, post-head-
trauma, Essa has been captured and
sold as a slave in the very palace
where she was born to rule, the very
palace she fled as a girl years before.
There, Fierce-frightened ends up
serving the wicked regent who was
betrothed to the infant Essa. In true
fairy-tale fashion, his kiss awakens
princess Essa's consciousness
where it sleeps within the slave
Fierce-frightened, and the reborn
monarch must determine how best
to rule the land which is hers — if,
indeed, she chooses to become its
ruler at all.

Dorsey (who is a poet and edi-
tor as well as novelist) writes a
lovely, fluid, dreamlike prose. The
shifts in point-of-view, from Essa
to Fierce-frightened to the older Essa
(among others), are beautifully done,
and amount to a tour de force of
narrative voices. But they are also
confusing, and the confusion is
heightened by Dorsey's choice of

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

character names: Essa, Ea, Elta, F.,
XX. Her intent, as with Black Wine's
generic science fantasy backdrop,
is no doubt to invoke a sense of
timelessness, a hallmark of the sf
novel of ideas. Instead it undercuts
the immediacy of her world, makes
it seem a mere playing-board where
XX and Essa and the rest are moved
about, brightly colored representa-
tions of Ideas: Slavery, Democracy,
Fascism, Child Neglect and Abuse,
Freedom.

Dorsey herself seems aware of
this: at one point, a character la-
ments, "''Oh, expository lump !. . .WeVe
been talking about it too long. When
you write your book about it, this is
thepart that isgoingtosoundreally
boring.'" And while Dorsey is, ulti-
mately, preaching to the choir (Sla-
very, Fascism, Abuse: BAD. VERY
BAD. Care to offer a dissenting
view?), she ends her book with a
heartbreaking scene of individual
liberation: Essa embracing her other
selves, as well as the wicked regent,
the mother who abandoned her and
the abusive grandmother who is
the novel's demonic materfamil-
ias. In this ultimate vision of tran-
scendence and forgiveness. Black
Wine becomes strong stuff, indeed.

Christopher Priest's The Pres-
tige is another novel that derives

much of its narrative fire from shift-
ing points of view — in this case,
the voices of two professional ma-
gicians whose bitter, almost insane,
rivalry poisons not only their own
lives but those of their descen-
dents.

Alfred Borden, son of a wheel-
wright, is Le Professeur de la Magie;
the aristocrat Rupert Angier is his
nemesis. The Great Danton. Their
careers form parallel arcs across
Victorian England — a wonderful
staging ground for magicians, spiri-
tualists, mesmerists, scientists,
hypocrites. To varying degrees,
Borden and Angier are all of the
above, as well as cozy adulterers
(each keeps a mistress, as well as a
wife and children). But mostly,
Borden and Angier are adversaries,
their mutual rivalry honed to a fatal
edge through a series of mishaps,
misplaced efforts at reconciliation,
professional jealousies, and pure
spleen.

A tragic accident spurs the
fledgling illusionists into lifelong
battle. In their ceaseless profes-
sional struggle for pre-eminence,
the magicians over time begin to
mirror each other, stealing tricks
and repartee, lovers and lovely as-
sistants, all the while attempting
to create a stage illusion that will
trump all that have come before. So

BOOKS

it is that Borden develops first The
Transported Man and then The New
Transported Man, illusions in
which the magician is instanta-
neously transmitted from one
onstage cabinet to another thirty
feet away. Angier is baffled and in-
furiated by the trick, and his own
popularity begins to slide in the
wake of Le Professeur de Magie's
grand success with The New Trans-
ported Man. It is not until Borden
meets up with that pioneering elec-
trical genius, Nikola Tesla (Edison
got all the glory, but the maverick
Tesla is beloved of contemporary
novelists), that he finally comes up
with his own ultimate illusion, an
extrapolation of The New Trans-
ported Man which Angier calls In A
Flash. Ah, but there is a horrific
price to pay for Tesla's sublime de-
vice, and Angier finds himself pay-
ing it, onstage for sell-out crowds,
night after night after night.

There is a certain amount of
grim humor to The Prestige, the
blatant Can-You-Top-This? career-
ism of dueling prestidigitators
whose feud is carried out against
the lush backdrop of fin-de-siecle
London. And the novel provides the
pleasures of a mystery as well, as
the reader attempts to find the man
(or men) behind the curtain, and
discover the true parentage of An-

drew Westley, who may or may not
be related to Borden.

But at its core The Prestige is a
horror novel, and a particularly ter-
rifying one because its secret is re-
vealed so slowly, and in such splen-
did language. Priest traces the moral
decay of these two demonic crea-
tures with the precision and in-
tensely focused intelligence of a
surgeon baring a diseased corpus to
an intern: See? here is the twisted
cell that poisoned its fellow organs,
and here is the heart laid waste by
neglect and deceit, and here the
damaged brain that gave shape to
such monstrous thoughts. And
there is a particularly nightmarish
scene that may leave sensitive par-
ents extremely reluctant to patch
up any differences between warring
families. Priest is a superb writer
(the book won both the James Tait
Black and World Fantasy Awards).
His prose is elegant and exquisitely
understated, and leaves one with
the very real impression of having
witnessed the bravura illusions he
describes with such economy. There
are a few minor flaws, lapses of
logic and continuity that are mildly
distracting, on a par with the
illusionist's doves losing a few feath-
ers in flight. But ultimately. The
Prestige is both disturbing and ex-
hilarating — one closes the book

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

shaken, wondering how it was done;
and eager to see what the master
illusionist will produce for his next
trick.

Finally, there is Burning Your
Boats, a posthumous collection of
Angela Carter's short stories. If
Tolkien introduced fantastic litera-
ture to the twentieth century on a
grand scale, then Carter gave it an
education and made it respectable,
but without sacrificing the supreme
and occasionally scatological au-
dacity that distinguished her work
from the beginning. Sexy, garish,
fiercely intelligent, and often con-
tentious, Carter's tales are at once
sophisticated and earthy — one
thinks of those highly colored aris-
tocrats beloved of Carnaby Street
in the 1960s, dropping ashes from a
spliff onto the priceless Pucci tu-
nic, sipping electric Kool-Aid from
a gold-rimmed Limoges tea-cup.
Judging from "The Man Who Loved
a Double Bass," published in Story-
teller Contest in 1962, Carter seems
to have sprung full-blown from the
head of some mythical, sometimes
pixilated raconteur, the spiritual
godchild of Isak Dinesen and P. T.
Barnum. Her later works are so well
known as to almost not need intro-
ducing: the erotic memoirs of Fire-
works, the gothic Black Venus, and

most of all the groundbreaking re-
cidivist fairy tales of The Bloody
Chamber, which opened the door
for countless stories, novels, plays,
and films by other writers who set
out to remake classic folktales in
their own image.

In his moving introduction to
Burning Your Boats, Carter's long-
time friend Salman Rushdie notes
that she is at present "the contem-
porary writer most studied at Brit-
ish universities." She is well-repre-
sented within the academy here
also, largely by virtue of the unre-
pentant feminism that colors her
writing. But Carter is no tyro vi-
rago. In her acidly lubricious sci-
ence fiction novel The Passion of
New Eve, one sees the author as
Equal Opportunity Destroyer, lay-
ing waste to sexism, cinema, and
serial killers with a glee I don't
think I've ever encountered in an-
other book: I swear you can hear her
whooping as you read.

Her short stories are wonderful
— better than her novels, some
people think, because more con-
trolled and far-ranging, from the
hushed delirium of "The Loves of
Lady Purple" to the elegiacal (and
hilarious) "Overture and Incidental
Music for A Midsummer Night's
Dream." The tales in The Bloody
Chamber have become modern

BOOKS

classics: the title story ''Bluebeard, "
with an unexpected ending cour-
tesy of The Mother to End All Moth-
ers,* the sexually charged "The
Tiger's Bride," with its gorgeous
final sentences; "The Company of
Wolves," which became the Neil
Jordan film. One of the joys of Burn-
ing Your Boats is seeing how, in her
later stories, Carter amuses herself,
as in "John Ford's Tis a Pity She*s a
Whore'*} "Ashputtle or The
Mother's Ghost," a three-tiered
trope upon "Cinderella" and "The
Juniper Tree"; and "In Pantoland,"
a loving and irreverent paean to
traditional English pantomime,
with its dancing cows and valiant

cats and Principal Boys whose jos-
tling breasts betray them.

If there is any lament to be
made about this collection, it is the
obvious one: that Angela Carter died
far too young, in 1992 at the age of
fifty-one. She casts a long, long
shadow, both for those of us who
love to read the literature of the
fantastic, and those who strive to
write it. It is still too sad to think,
even now, that there will be no
more books, no more tales by our
century's Scheherazade. So one
imagines her somewhere in
Pantoheaven, gleefully blowing
sparks upon all those dissertations
being written in her name.*^

Editor’s Recommendations

Maybe it's

a sign of the en-
croaching mil-
lennium. This
month's reading pile has a lot of
apocalypses in it.

Most of them can be found in
Revelations (HarperPrism), Douglas
E. Winter's terrific new anthology.
This one clearly is inspired by the
approach of the year 2000, as the
stories count down the twentieth
century decade by decade, from Joe
Lansdale's look at the early days of
boxing to Richard Christian
Matheson's 1970s rock scene
through to Clive Barker's vision of
the second coming. Revelations is
one of the rare theme anthologies
in which the theme amplifies the
individual stories (rather than lim-
iting them) and with such good sto-
ries to start with, it's saying a lot to
call this book more than the sum of
its parts.

The other big apocalypse of this
month coincidentally comes from
our other new book reviewer, Eliza-

beth Hand. In Glimmering
(HarperPrism), her finest novel to
date, she envisions a future nearly
upon us in which global warming
and solar storms produce the Glim-
mering.

The third apocalyptic vision is
one of this century's major ones:
J. G. Ballard's Crash (Noonday Press)
brilliantly blurred the distinctions
between human and machine a de-
cade before the cyberpunk move-
ment arrived. Read the book and
see David Cronenberg's powerful
film adaptation. ..and then observe
the people around you and see
where their machines stop and they
begin.

Speaking of machines and hu-
mans, Rudy Rucker's Freeware
(Avon Books) takes even further the
wild extrapolations of Software
(1982) and Wetware (1988). This
time out, Rucker imagines
"moldies" — evolved robots made
of algae and soft plastics — and
warps through some wild scenarios
Mother would never approve of.

EDITOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS

While the book stands on its own,
you'll do best to read the first two
books in order to follow the chro-
nology, and as always with
Rucker's novels, you'll do well if
you're ready to accept almost any-
thing.

Those of you who enjoyed R.
Garcia y Robertson's "The Moon
Maid" last year will be pleased to
see he has worked it into a new
novel, Atlantis Found (AvoNova),
which takes moderns back through
time for a first-rate tale of men who
would be gods.

Among the annual anthologies,
the Nebula volume always offers an
interesting counterpoint to the
"Year's Best" collections. Nebula
Awards 31 (Harcourt Brace), edited
by Pamela Sargent, deftly mixes
Nebula winners and nominees with

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essays and articles into a rewarding
volume.

And returning to the theme of
humanity and machines, Geoff
Ryman's 253 (www.ryman-
novel.com) is a fascinating internet
work that should wear the word
"novel" loosely. 253 tells the sto-
ries of each of the 253 passengers
(well, 252 and the operator) on the

ephant and Castle. Each character
portrait is itself comprised of 253
words, so they make for quick read-
ing (a real virtue on the screen).
Clever and far less static than the
idea of it sounds, 253 is a terrific
verbal tapestry of life in the early
days of the Electronic Age. And
readers are welcome to contribute
to the next two cars. Hop on.

Jonathan Lethem was recently picked by Newsweek magazine to be one of the 100
Americans to watch for in the next century. His most recent novel is As She
Climbed Across the Table. Angus MacDonald is the editor of California Entertain-
ment Review and has published criticism and articles in the Whole Earth Review,
Music Poll 5000, and elsewhere. They note that a previous draft of this story bore
the title ^'Chopping Broccoli." (Don't ask me why — / just work here.)

The Edge of
the Bed of Forever

By Jonathan Lethem
and Angus MacDonald

TRAND KNEW HIS WIFE

would soon notice how terribly old he
was getting. It was only a matter of
time. Lingering before his bathroom

mirror, he catalogued the ravages. The yellow of his eyes, the white
stubble growing up under, and out of, his nose, the saggy pouches of skin
accumulating around his jaw. There was no mistaking it. He was pulling
away from his wife, agewise. And soon it would be obvious to her.

Using the time platform had been a dirty little secret from the
beginning, but at the beginning he had had it under control. Now he was
spending as much time in no-time with Angela as he was back here in
realtime with his wife. And it was turning him into an old man. He had
no right to call himself forty-five anymore. He had lost track long before,
but he was surely at least fifty by now, biologically.

He opened the medicine cabinet and took out his bottle of dye —
disguised as a solution for remetabolizing corns — and began combing it
into his hair. A new irony occurred to him. His wife could save him. By

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

noticing his aging, and accusing him of the adultery, she would put the
stop to it that he couldn't himself. His lover, youthful, life-giving Angela,
was killing him, and only his wife could save him.

He finished, mussing his hair so it wouldn't look too combed.
Downstairs his wife waited for him to join her in the large kitchen. He
heard her. She was working already, piling the cotton shirts she and Strand
would decorate with commercial logos today. All would be spotlessly
clean, ready for the inking microbes they'd prepared the afternoon before.
She would keep stacking them, silently reproachful, while he read his
newsclod.

Finally, dressed, showered, every hair in or out of place as required, he
descended the stairs.

"Good morning," she said, too brightly. The further apart they grew
the more blandly cheerful she acted. She turned at the waist, without
removing her hands from the long workbench. "How long have you been
up?"

Strand glanced at his watch, resisting the impulse to tell a meaning-
less lie. "fust half an hour," he said. "Here, there's plenty of time. Come
and sit."

"In a minute." She continued stacking shirts.

Strand opened the front door, picked up the newsclod lying on the
welcome mat, and brought it inside. He emptied it from its packet into the
basin hidden under the table and leaned back in his seat, waiting for the
enzymes to decode the day's events and display the front page on the
screen above the counter. The image that appeared, however, was unintel-
ligible, shot through with colored streaks and abbreviated words. Strand
picked up the packet and examined it. A muddy claw mark pierced the
back. A cat or raccoon had eaten part of the news. Strand would have to
go without his usual dose of headlines. He was surprised to find he didn't
care. He felt something like relief, in fact, as he dumped the spoiled news
into a house plant's soil.

"Angela," he said, "did you make any coffee?"

He winced in pain. He had called Miriam "Angela." The name hung
in the air, irretrievable. A disaster.

Amazing. He switched labels on bottles, spent thousands of dollars
renting a room in no-time, and hid a time machine around the house. All

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

this, all the subterfuge and contortion, only to call his wife by his
mistress's name.

"Yes/' she said distantly. "Here you go." Strand fought to keep his
features from simply melting into a lump on his face as she set coffee in
front of him. Would she throw the cup in his lap? Or had she somehow not
heard?

"Thanks, " he said, gulping, struggling to return her slight smile. "Uh,
milk?" He rose to get the creamer from the appliance alcove.

"Yes, of course." Another smile. She really hadn't noticed.

He'd gotten away with it. "No news?"

He allowed himself a small lie — just an omission, really — as reward
for getting through the crisis. "I wasn't in the mood," he said.

Strand had only been to the offices of NoTime, Inc,, once, years
before, to set up the account when he and Angela began their affair. He'd
arranged then to have the daily code updates delivered to a storefront
maildrop so Miriam wouldn't see them. When he left the house today
Miriam showed little curiosity. His painstakingly rehearsed speech about
a visit to the podiatrist had done the trick.

Since his first visit to NoTime, the company had grown. The offices
were newly plush, the receptionist newly professional, her short dark hair
styled and lacquered. Strand had flirted with her on his first visit. Today
she was almost icy. She directed Strand to a waiting area across the room,
and he sat across from the only other client there, a young man with a
fashionable slush hat and heavy, tired eyes. A sagging rucksack took up
the seat beside him.

The man was drawing a diagram on a scrap of paper on the table
between them. Strand leaned forward to catch a glimpse. A problem in
Radial Bowls. It looked like the man — little more than a boy — was
sketching alternate aiming strategies, based on which of the 4,320 target
regions his opponent seized.

"I used to play a little Radial," Strand said, as cheerily as possible.

"I'm the regional NCAA champion," came the reply, in a distracted
monotone. His voice was quiet.

"No."

"Yes," said the man, a little defensively. "I'm Zip Lignorelli." He

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

looked up and stared at Strand. "'Fve been playing for State since I was a
freshman. Youngest champion ever.'"

Strand recognized the boy's face. "You were on the newsclod yester-
day. You won — no, you lost a pasture."

"I lost. Tm losing four pastures to one."

"What are you doing here?"

Zip took a deep breath and leaned back. "It's kinda stupid. Maybe I
shouldn't be talking to you — "

"You rent no-time," said Strand. The logic of it was obvious. "You
work on your moves for Radial. You beat the time clock."

"You — you a reporter?"

"Relax. Your secret's safe with me. Where do you hide the — "

Zip put a finger to his lips and smiled painfully. "Shhh. In the
bathroom of the stadium." He sighed deeply and looked at the ceiling,
then back at Strand. "It's not for the game, though. I got orals, for the
baccalaureate, y'know? Coming up. During the nationals for Radial." He
looked at his shoes and laughed. "Something had to give, right?"

"That's brilliant," said Strand. "What's the matter?"

Zip sighed again, and cast his eyes down.

"You're losing," said Strand. "The other one, what's her name,
Andreyeva, she's better." He marveled at Lignorelli. So young, so wrapped
up in sport. He wanted to urge him to forget the game and find himself a
warm, loving female, but he wasn't sure the student, with his flip manner
and self-absorption, would know how.

"I'll lose. I think you're right. It's either that or put my full attention
to it and flunk the orals."

"Does anyone know you come here? What — "

Zip shook his head slightly and lowered his voice. "I'm by myself.
Came in today 'cause I wanna different room."

Strand started to ask: what room? Then he saw that Zip meant his
room in the no-time hotel.

What a funny idea. The rooms, as everyone knew, were all alike.

" — I kinda want one with a window, right?" The kid presented his
case as though Strand worked for NoTime, Inc. "The room's so plain,
y'know? No window, can't think. Going crazy. I could use just a little
view. Even a fence or an access road or something..."

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

"'You poor guy/' said Strand gently. "The hotel is what they call a
time-station, like a space station. It's just hanging there, you see. Adjacent
to our world."

He took the paper and pen away from Zip and drew a little diagram:
a building suspended in space. "It's hanging out in no-time. There's no
view. If it were in the world, with a view, then time would be passing.
Understand?"

"Oh," said Zip. He looked down, then clapped his hands to his knees.
"Well, that's that."

"Mr. Lignorelli," the receptionist called out. "Mr. Axelrod will see
you now."

Zip looked at Strand with panic in his eyes, then obediently rose
from his seat and stepped over to the desk. Strand, feeling protective,
followed.

"I gotta, I mean, you can cancel my appointment," said Zip. The
woman narrowed her eyes. Strand remembered again how bubbly she'd
been when NoTime was a new operation.

"It's okay, " he said. "I helped him with a question he was going to ask
Axelrod. It's all cleared up."

The receptionist paused long enough to make sure Strand knew she
thought this was improper. "I guess that makes it your turn, Mr. Strand.
You've saved yourself some waiting."

Strand turned to shake hands with Zip. "Good luck," he said.

"Thanks," said Zip. "Uh, good luck to you too." He moved toward the
elevators as Strand was ushered into Axelrod's office.

"I had the idea," said Strand, after he and Axelrod introduced them-
selves, "that I could somehow lure my wife, unawares, into a room in the
hotel — perhaps in a sleep-state, or hypnotized — and get her to pass a
couple of years. Do you follow me?"

"You're concerned with the age differential," said Axelrod with a
tight smile. "I understand you perfectly." He passed a hand smoothly over
his thinning hair. "It's a very exciting suggestion, Mr. Strand. It also, if I
read you correctly, constitutes kidnapping." He looked down at his desk,
then back up at Strand. "No, worse, I think. It's really a variant of murder."

"Oh," said Strand, stupefied.

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

Axelrod pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and
forefinger. "Please — don't feel I've accused — "

"Oh, no," said Strand. "You're absolutely right. I just hadn't thought
— it was a stupid idea." Silent panic coated his nerves with ice.

Axelrod regained his poise. "It's far from — " He coughed, then went
on. "The ramifications often escape the layman, Mr. Strand. That's what
we're here for." He smiled again, this time with something like warmth.
"Richard — may I call you Richard? — you're one of our oldest non-
commercial accounts. We're quite aware of your consistent use of your
room in the hotel, and we want to help. I'm surprised, frankly, that we
didn't hear from you sooner. This type of thing is our third-ranking
customer concern."

"Oh," said Strand again. The cold subsided, leaving lukewarm
sweat.

"I'm sure you realize that the effects you're concerned with are
irreversible. My counsel to you is going to be very simple, and you may
find it disappointing." Axelrod folded his hands. "Just because you're
keeping the room doesn't mean you've got to use it every day, Richard.
Ease up. Spend less time there when you go. Because otherwise — "

Axelrod turned his palms outward in a gesture of helplessness. Strand
realized now that he had been counting on Axelrod's providing some
answer, some counter-spell to NoTime's original magic. He wanted a
refund on his lost time, wanted everyone but him to spend ten years in the
hotel while he caught up. He wanted to be young again, even young and
stupid, like Zip Lignorelli, instead of old and stupid, like himself.

He was suddenly aware that his face was covered with tears. Axelrod
was sympathetic now. "Here," he said. He opened a desk drawer, brought
out a mirror strewn with chamomile and handed Strand a slip of paper
rolled into a tube.

Strand tried to snort, but his nose was clogged from weeping. He
mimed satisfaction for Axelrod's sake and slid the tray back across the
desk.

The waiting room was empty as Strand went to the elevator. He
stopped at the table, hoping to retrieve the Radial Bowls diagram as a
memento of his encounter with Zip. Instead he found a booklet with code
updates for the NoTime hotel. It was the first Strand had ever seen besides

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

his own. Apart from an unfamiliar account number at the top, it could
have been his own.

Zip had left it behind. With a guilty look over his shoulder — the
receptionist was busy with papers on her desk — Strand slipped it into his
pocket, then hurried to the elevator.

STRAND ENDURED a lengthy dinner with

Miriam, the whole time glancing surreptitiously at his
watch. He and Angela had a date this evening, in the
hotel, and he was eager for relief from the pressures of
the day. Miriam wouldn't stop talking, either about new commercial
clients they'd already snared or about the comic strip panels that had
turned up on some of the house plants' leaves.

Before dessert, he carried the dishes into the kitchen. After arranging
them on the dishwasher's tongue, he picked up the compost bag and went
out back. Once he'd dropped the bag in the bin by the back fence, he crept
into the storage shed, laid his wristwatch across the hibernating
lawnmower's muzzle, and unfolded the time platform hidden in an old
box of automobile parts. He took the code update from his pocket and was
about to punch in the figures when he noticed the strange number at the
top of the printout. It was Zip's.

Odd, he thought. What would have happened?

Strand conceived uneasily that he would have traveled into the
student champion's past, or rather, dragged Zip into his future. For while
Strand would have been perfectly able to jump back to his original point
of departure and finish his meal with Miriam, Zip would have been forced
to jump ahead to that point too. The computer that regulated the jumping
enforced this rule. You couldn't use the hotel to go back in time. Zip would
have walked into the bathroom of the contest hall and vanished for days.
Strand would have destroyed the kid's careers, both athletic and aca-
demic.

And it had nearly happened.

Strand repocketed Zip's code, found his own, fresh from his maildrop,
and entered the numerals.

He was transported instantly. But the room was empty. No Angela.
There was no being late for a rendezvous in the NoTime hotel, by

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

definition. Angela's absence meant she hadn't used this code in the past
and would not use it in the future — if she had she would be here with him
at the start of the booking.

The day was a double loss, this new disappointment punctuating the
earlier one. Strand felt profoundly old and tired.

He knew to return immediately, to avoid logging any useless time
here at the hotel. When he materialized in the shed, his mood lifted slightly.
He always felt relief at returning to "normal" life after a clandestine
sojourn in the hotel. His watch was warm from the lawnmower's breath.
He strapped it onto his wrist and went inside to have dessert with Miriam.

The next day Strand caught a bus to Zip's college. His newsclod had
said the match was suspended for a day at the request of the Lignorelli's
handlers. It was widely interpreted as a sign of growing desperation on the
part of the beleaguered young champion.

Strand found Zip alone in his room, bent over a small replica of a
Radial Bowls green.

"Why aren't you in no-time?" asked Strand. He felt paternal toward
Zip, as he had the day before. "You shouldn't have called time-out. It's
making a bad impression."

"Doesn't matter," said the student, "I'm not gonna be the youngest
champion much longer. I'll lose the match or end up older than Andreyeva.
Or both."

"My trouble exactly, " said Strand, "If I stayed in no- time long enough
to solve my problem I'd be an old man."

Zip seemed confused, "Your problem? Huh?"

Strand smiled. "My problem is I spend too much time in the hotel
trying to solve my problem, which is the hotel. Forget it. Here." He pulled
out Zip's code update. "You shouldn't leave this lying around."

He explained how close he'd come to doing something disastrous
with the code.

"No," said Zip, shaking his head. "We wouldn't be trapped going back
together. I could've jumped to another room, and from there come back to
my own time — "

"Uh-uh," said Strand. "No one can go from room to room in the hotel.
It causes time paradoxes. Screw-ups, the future meeting the past."

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

'"Axelrod can/' insisted Zip. "He left from my room. He had a call on
his beeper. I saw him do it. He said it was him only."

"What was Axelrod doing in your room?"

Zip shrugged. "Told me he visited all new clients. He wanted to talk
about Radial." The student snorted mirthfully. "I told him my problem,
but he couldn't even comprehend, let alone help find the answer."

Strand felt suddenly self-conscious. Axelrod must have been drawn to
the young man, much as Strand himself was. Strand pictured Axelrod
showing off forbidden tricks with the time system, trying to impress the
kid.

"Axelrod could have helped you, then," said Strand. "He could have
gone up the line, found someone who knew the outcome of the match.
Told you what your opponent's throws were."

And he could help me. Strand thought. He could have gone into the
future and found out whether Angela and I stayed together. Whether it was
worth all this, in the end.

"I don't think that would work," said Zip. "Probably the outcome is
I lose. I think there isn't any right throw at this point."

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Strand. "Axelrod would never do it.
He's very unimaginative about the whole no-time setup. I'd do it, but of
course I don't know the codes." Strand recognized that he was vying
jealously for Zip's affections.

"I remember the number," said Zip idly, as though it wasn't impor-
tant.

"What?"

"Photographic memory. In grade school I was on TV for memorizing
the entire Wichita telephone directory. I saw Axelrod type the code into
the console."

"What are you saying?"

"The picture's still in my mind. Five-four-six-two-zero-zero. A prefix,
for overriding the computer. Then he types the code he wants — "

Strand felt a sudden thirst to know the hotel, to possess it as fully as
Axelrod did. He'd spent enough time there, after all. It was his turf, as
much as Axelrod's.

"Let's go," he said.

"What?" said Zip.

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

''Let's go together/' said Strand, his excitement mounting. "We'll
find out about that Radial move. Who knows what we'll find? Hell, we
might even find a room with a view for you."

Zip raised an eyebrow, and didn't say anything.

"Come on," said Strand. More than anything, he wanted to guide the
boy to victory. He wanted almost as badly to put no-time to some other
use, now that Angela had stood him up; he wanted to renew his use of the
hotel, make it mean more than just the affair.

Zip opened up the drawer of the desk and lifted out his time platform.

Strand had his in his briefcase. He'd been thinking of taking it to
NoTime Inc. and turning it in.

The room looked the same as Strand's. But the bed was stripped, the
blankets and sheets in a pile at the foot, and from the bathroom came the
sound of running water, and someone humming a meandering tune. On
the dresser was a smoldering hand-rolled cigarette, and the room was
filled with the sweet stink of marijuana smoke.

Strand and Zip turned and looked at one another, but neither
spoke.

An elderly black man came out of the bathroom, holding a sponge and
a sprayer bottle. He would have been fairly short if he had been standing
up straight; bent, as he was, like a question mark, he barely stood five feet
tall. He opened his mouth in cartoonishly exaggerated surprise at seeing
Strand and Zip in the room.

"You ain't supposed to come in like that, now. This is one of the in-
between times. I ain't got the place made up."

"I'm sorry," blurted Strand, marveling. They'd discovered staff.

Suddenly the man's eyes narrowed. "You checkin' up on me?"

"Oh, no," said Strand.

"You could be lyin'," said the man. "Lots of people lyin'." He looked
at Zip, who shook his head in wide-eyed fear.

"But we're not," protested Strand. "Listen, do you recognize this
man? He's a famous Radial Bowls player. He's involved in a very impor-
tant match — "

"I don't know nothin' about Radial," said the man suspiciously. He
went to the dresser and stubbed out the smoldering joint.

FANTASY A. SCIENCE FICTION

"'It's on the front page of the newsclods, ” said Strand. ''Everyone reads
about it — "

"Oh yeah? Well I ain't seen any newsclod either."

"What/' said Strand. "Do you and the other — the others who clean
the rooms stay in the hotel all the time?"

"Ain't no others/' grumbled the man.

"Are you saying you clean the whole place yourself? There couldn't
possibly be time enough — "

"Time? There's plenty of time. And for every time there is, there's a
between time, like right now. Me 'n' Yaller just clean it up when we
ready." He indicated the aging scrubhound that had shambled out of the
bathroom after licking the fixtures. "Ain't no hurry."

"Where do you live?" said Strand, confused.

"Oh, ho." For some reason this was amusing. "Way do I live? I live
down the line a bit." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Same as all
the rest, but I do like it back there. Feels clean and new. Ain't no one
sleepin' in the bed before I sleep in it."

"Uh, Strand?" said Zip, strain evident in his voice.

"Yes." Strand tried not to appear flustered. He felt mildly affected by
the marijuana fumes. "Well, I'm sorry we intruded. We'll just go and come
back later. Some kind of slip-up, I suppose."

"Okay," said the janitor, shrugging. "I get it all clean up in a bit. Heh
heh. So long."

Strand realized the man took him and Zip for a couple. "Here," said
Zip. He'd scribbled a new number onto a sheet of the hotel's stationery.

It was the first time Strand had jumped from room to room within the
hotel, and for a moment he thought Zip and the janitor had simulta-
neously vanished. But the bed was made. It was another identical room.

At that moment Zip appeared.

"Where are we?" said Strand. "How did you get this code?"

"It's easy for me to extrapolate the numbers," said Zip. "But I dunno
where they wind up." He looked around. "At least no one's here."

Strand was impatient. How could they learn anything in an empty
room? "Let's jump again — "

"No," said Zip, his voice high and squeaky. "I can't stay here
anymore. This is getting too weird."

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

"You don't want to see the rest of the hotel?"

"I never wanted to see the hotel. That's your bag. Besides, I have a
Radial move to make." The student suddenly relaxed.

Strand felt bereft. He'd secretly wanted Zip's dilemma to be perma-
nent, insoluble, like his own. To lead further into the hotel, not out of it.
"You have a throw?"

"More: a strategy. It came to me while I was working with the codes,
instead of thinking of the game. It happens like that."

"I understand," said Strand, hiding his disappointment. "Go and win
the game."

"No," said Zip. "I'm going to draw."

Strand felt betrayed. "Shouldn't you try to win?" Wasn't that the
point? But he knew he was naive about Radial.

Zip smiled. "I'm at the top of my game. Or maybe I'm fading; same
thing." He shrugged. "Even if I won this match. I'd lose the next, y'know?
I should just get on with my life."

Strand began to see. "So if you draw, you retire without losing?"

"In a sense. And," here Zip actually grinned, the first time Strand had
seen him truly happy, "you helped me. Since you told me before that all
the rooms are identical, right? Like the Radial slices, where we move from
pasture to pasture, but they're all really the same. The way the balls lie
now — it's like this: I can make a particular throw, a short easy roll, that
she'll have to defend against. And her only possible roll will put me in the
same jeopardy, so I'll be forced into one of two throws. One is ordinary, and
after that I'd need a new strategy — and there just isn't one. But the other
will force her into the same defense. And then it'll be a closed cycle, unless
one of us aims badly on purpose: we'll have no choice but to chase each
other around the green, through all the slices, forever. Movement, but no
true change. So I won't win, but I'll have made my mark."

Strand understood. It was something entirely new for the sport. He
could even share some satisfaction at the idea. "And they'll name the
maneuver after you, I guess."

"Probably. So thanks, y'know? Maybe you'll be famous with Radial
fans, too."

"Don't," said Strand. "You can't use my name."

Understanding lit the boy's face. "Sorry. I didn't wanna — I mean, I

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

guess you got enough troubles, right?"

Strand relaxed.

"What will I do?" he said.

"Here." Zip went to the desk, and began scribbling out codes. "I can
extrapolate codes from the pattern — "

"They can't all work," said Strand. "The hotel can't go on forever."

Zip shrugged. "Maybe it'll reject the useless codes." He continued
writing. "Here's a few dozen. And here, if you want to go back, the return
code, to my room." He circled it twice. "Where you left your platform."

Strand felt exhilarated and dumbfounded at once. He was free to roam
the hotel. After years of jumping to a single room he was going to possess
the territory, plumb its depths.

But he was to do it alone. Zip was punching in his return code at the
wall console.

"Good luck," said the young man.

"Yes," said Strand, but by then he was alone. He felt a moment of
sadness, but it passed. There wasn't any reason to sit in the hotel, moping.

He went to the wall console and punched in the topmost code on the

list.

It was very much the same room again, with just one difference, a big
one: two people sat on the edge of the bed, which was unmade, and neither
of them wore any clothes. Most oddly, Strand knew who the two people
were.

Angela and Axelrod.

"Richard!" blurted Angela. She didn't make any move to cover
herself. Axelrod, on the other hand, grabbed his pants from beside the bed
and leapt to his feet.

"I don't understand," said Strand numbly.

"You don't have to understand," said Axelrod. "You're in a lot of
trouble. Where'd you get this code? " He sucked in his gut and fastened his
trousers.

"Code, code," said Strand. "Uh, it was on that rolled-up paper you
gave me in your office. For snorting the chamomile." Strand wanted to
protect Zip, and this seemed an opportunity for a vicious lie. He wondered
if it was vicious enough.

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

''That's nonsense/' snarled Axelrod. "You shouldn't trifle with me,
Dick. You're under quarantine as of right now."

"Quarantine?"

"Time quarantine, Dick. What do you think you're achieving by
blundering into the hotel like this?"

"Stop calling me Dick."

Axelrod hurriedly buttoned his shirt and tucked it into his pants.
"Listen, old man," he said, stepping up to poke a finger at Strand's chest,
"you don't seem to understand — "

Strand reared back, uncorking his hostility, and, from some unprec-
edented inner wellspring, delivered a championship-caliber punch to
Axelrod's midsection. The younger man fell in a heap at Strand's feet.
Strand noted with satisfaction Axelrod's bald spot, now quickly flushing
pink. Old man.

"Oh, Jesus, Richard," said Angela.

"Motherfucker," gasped Axelrod from the floor.

Angela got up, still naked, and helped Axelrod to the bed. Strand
watched, furious. It seemed to him that Angela ought to rush to him and
plead out an explanation. But apparently she didn't agree.

"Okay," croaked Axelrod, his arms wrapped protectively around his
middle. "Now listen. You can run if you like, deeper into the hotel — it
doesn't matter. When you come out I'll catch you and hang you by the
balls. Understand?"

"What if I never come out? " said Strand. "What if I just roam the hotel
for a while? Kick everybody out, take it over."

Axelrod shook his head. "You'll come out. Trust me. You can get it
over with fast, or play it out. Either way I'll get you."

"What are you talking about?"

"This is the future, Dicky-boy. You wanted to learn about the future
— fine. But the future gets to learn about you, too. You fucked up, and
you've got about, ah, about two weeks before we catch you."

"Two weeks?"

"Tell him, Angela."

Angela looked up from the bed guiltily. "I — I broke it off, Richard.
Remember when I didn't come to the room?"

"Yesterday," said Strand firmly.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Angela shook her head. '"Two weeks ago. We've talked about it, only
I guess you don't know yet. I'm sorry."

"You — you don't want to be with me anymore?" Strand ignored
Axelrod's red-faced sneer.

Angela simply looked down at the floor, and now, only now, grew
modest, reaching for a sheet to cover her breasts.

"What happened?" said Strand.

She looked up, her expression pleading. "Oh, Richard. I went to
Daniel's office, about our problem." She glanced at Axelrod, who nodded,
then went on. "fust as you did. You knew as well as I did that we needed
a way to stop. A way out."

"And Daniel here offered you one."

She nodded silently.

"You're a married man, Dick," said Axelrod.

Strand sagged. The air had gone out of his universe. "How could you
tell I didn't know about the breakup yet?"

"You turned in your platform two weeks ago," said Axelrod. "Right
after the breakup. Renounced no-time. So this bouncing around, this
intrusion — it had to be before. There's no way you can return to a time
after you turn in your platform. We've got you pinned. We're later than you."

"So now I go back. To have Angela break it off. And then I wait around
for the arrest."

Axelrod smiled. "It certainly looks that way."

"But no. That can't be right." Strand realized how little Axelrod knew
about the situation. "You're only learning now. You don't know what you'll
find when you jump back. Perhaps I'll have vanished. Or perhaps — " He
kept himself from mentioning Lignorelli's platform. "Maybe by the time
you come back I'll own NoTime, Inc. I'll have your job. You can't possibly
know."

"Not exactly," said Axelrod. "Think it through. We've seen you
around and about the last two weeks — Angela had to have someone to
break up with, didn't she? You came back. So the only indeterminacy is
what you did this afternoon before I pinned down your location, which I'll
do as soon as we go back. In fact, I have a much better sense of how you
spent the last two weeks than you do. Because for you they're the future
— unknown."

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

"It's true, Richard," said Angela.

"So go ahead, Dick. Do your worst." Axelrod was able to sit up
straight now; he shrugged Angela away and pointed an accusing finger.
"Maybe you're right, maybe you'll own NoTime. All I know is you didn't
own shit this morning when I left. You weren't even man enough to come
up to the offices and confront me about Angela. You'd been avoiding me."

Strand looked to Angela. She softened her eyes and nodded sadly. Was
she communicating something, offering some hope? Or merely urging
him to follow Axelrod's sneering orders?

"Go back, Dick," said Axelrod. "Don't make a mess of it."

Instead Strand punched in the next code from Zip's list, and jumped.

HE FIRST THING he noticed was the banner
stretched out over the bed, a fading printout that read:
STRAND GO HOME. Then he saw the poker game: five
grizzled, middle-aged men sitting around a card table.
The table was littered with cigarette butts and disarrayed piles of poker
chips; behind it, the bed was strewn with delicatessen sandwiches. Strand
felt something under his foot. He looked down. He was standing on a hat.
The men turned to face him. "Can we help you with something?" said

one.

"We're all paid up for the room," said another.

Strand was struck dumb.

"Hey," said one of the others, in an exaggerated tone of wonderment,
"you're that guy — you know, the one Danny Axelrod used to talk about
— the one who went crazy and got lost in the hotel — "

"Where you been, man?" said another. "They gave up on you a long
time ago."

"I'm not lost," said Strand. "I've been in the hotel less than an
hour."

"You ought to get in touch with Axelrod," said the first man. "He
doesn't even know you're still here."

Strand took his foot off the hat. "Tell Axelrod to go fuck himself," he
said. "Tell him to stop playing games with me." He turned and punched
a new number into the console.

He jumped to the sound of laughter at his back.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

The next room was empty. Apart from the banner again: STRAND
GO HOME.

Strand saw now that Axelrod had jumped ahead and spoiled the hotel.
There wasn't anywhere Axelrod hadn't already been. Strand had a sheet
with twenty-some-odd codes, but Axelrod had access to the formula that
generated codes to begin with.

And suddenly he understood something else: there wasn't any hotel.
There was only a room, because that was all there needed to be. One room,
extended endlessly through no-time. Suddenly the janitor's talk made
sense. All the various liaisons and retreats were played out not side by side
in some vast, drifting hotel, but one after another in the same little room,
the same little desk and bed. With an elderly janitor and a scrubhound to
swab it out after each visit.

It rendered Strand's desperation absurd. He'd been struggling to
inhabit a single room.

He suddenly felt a terror of isolation there, alone, a thin shell of cheap
wallboard between him and the no-time. It was the loneliest place there
could possibly be.

He couldn't think of what to do.

Like Zip, he couldn't go back until he came up with a move. His
opponent, like Zip's, sat and waited across from an empty chair. Only in
Strand's case his opponent was ruin, abandonment, and death. And Strand
lacked even the option to draw.

He punched another code into the console.

A woman was standing on the bed, taping the new GO HOME banner
to the wall. One end draped over a pillow onto the floor.

Securing one corner with tape, she turned and smiled. "Good to see
you again." She swayed slightly where she stood on the mattress, towering
over Strand.

After a moment he recognized her. "You're the receptionist. You
work for Axelrod."

She snorted mirthfully. "Axelrod thinks so. I mean, I do. But I was also
waiting for you, and I'm doing that for myself. And for you."

Strand wondered how she could know he'd be there now, then
blurted, "You got the list from Zip."

"I know Zip made you a list, and I know what codes he had to use as

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

bases. It's the same thing." She shifted her weight and slid a drooping lock
of hair from her forehead. "I needed to use a calculator^ though. Couldn't
do it in my head, the way he does."

Strand sagged in relief that the boy wasn't in league with Axelrod.

She spoke again. "Axelrod's a stooge. He has nothing to do with your
real problem. He doesn't even know what it is."

"He told me he couldn't help me. And he wants to kill me."

"Danny couldn't kill a sick puppy. And he wouldn't need to help
you even if he wanted. You're not aging in no-time, baby, not like you
think."

He gaped.

"Think about it. How much time do you think you've lost?"

"Five years, I figure."

She laughed again. "You figure, or you feel? Look, you've been a client
for less than ten years, and you didn't start using the hotel a whole lot until
the last few weeks. I can give you your real count: it adds up to about six
months."

Strand felt dizzy with bafflement and relief. "But my hair, the..."

"Listen. You're forty-five years old. Or maybe forty-five and a half.
But that's it."

He sat on the edge of the bed, not caring if she looked down on him.
"I feel so stupid."

"Don't. You're not the only one to worry about that. It's our third-
ranking customer concern."

"I guess I knew I was losing Angela, and couldn't face it." He started
to cry. "I was using her for so long, and she never asked me to leave
Miriam, and — "

The receptionist sat down on the mattress suddenly and pressed
herself against his side. "She didn't want you to leave Miriam. If she
wanted a man all to herself she wouldn't ever have been with you." She
snorted again. "And she sure wouldn't be with Danny Axelrod."

"I'll miss her, though."

She grabbed his arm tightly. Strand felt her breath chilling the tear
streaks on his face. "Maybe, but you'll miss the rest of it a lot more. Did
Angela herself need anywhere near the care you had to give to the
planning, the slipping away?" His tears had dried and her breath was hot

FANTASY A SCIENCE FICTION

on his eyes. ''Didn't you panic the first time you noticed your watch was
hours fast? Did your wife notice it before you did, and ask you about it?
Didn't it feel great after you lied your way out of it? And doesn't it feel
great now, every time that you take the watch off first, that rush of
competence and secrecy? " She breathed, "Some people just need that, and
you got it with a woman instead of with, say, shoplifting like I used to."
She stopped, her chest heaving against his sleeve.

Strand recalled the disappointment he felt over Miriam not noticing
when he called her by the wrong name, "It did take a lot of effort to keep
her from finding out,"

She got a pinched look around her mouth and inhaled sharply. After
a moment he realized that she'd succeeded at not laughing in his face.

"Oh," he said. "Oh."

"You're not the only one to think that, either." She smiled and
released his arm, "So you don't really have a problem, not like you
thought. You just need to find another secret to play chase-me with." She
stood and pulled him to his feet, then kissed him quickly on the lips,
pressing the length of her body up against him. She smelled lightly of
sweat and hair lacquer.

"You'll go back now, won't you?" she said.

"I suppose so," said Strand. Then he felt wary. "So you've done your
job — I'll return, and Axelrod will nab me."

She laughed. "You should be more trusting. You and Axelrod are
exactly the same, thinking everything's cops and robbers."

She stepped away and looked at him, "If you want, you can phone me
at NoTime, It's always me answering, or the service. Now get going; I need
to finish this," She grabbed the loose end of the banner and stepped back
up on the mattress.

He hesitated. Her warmth lingered on his chest and legs. "But if I call
you now, won't it be too early?"

She faced him, laughing and swaying. "What do you mean by 'now'?
What do you mean by 'early'?" She turned back to fussing with the banner.

Strand went to the console.

He started to punch in the return code, then paused, and substituted
another code from the list.

A woman lay fully clothed atop the bed, turned on her side away from

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

him. He felt a surprising surge of attraction toward her before recognizing
her dress. It was Miriam.

His nerves iced over, just as when Axelrod had teased him with the
murder accusation. How could she know I'd be here? he asked himself. He
tensed as he waited for her to turn and confront him.

As the seconds passed, however, she remained still, showing no sign
of turning. He saw that she didn't know anyone had entered the room; at
the same time he saw her ribs heaving in noiseless sobs. On the bedspread
beyond her sat several boxes of tissues. He knew the brand from her
stockpile in the closet. He'd never thought to wonder why she bought in
bulk.

Used tissues littered the floor. He felt a brief twinge of sympathy for
the janitor, before reflecting that Miriam probably was one of the easiest
clients to clean up after. She'd even brought her own towel to catch her
tears on the pillow. The towel was in a color he hadn't seen around the
house in months, that he'd assumed had been thrown out.

Then he noticed that it was nearly new.

He punched in the code for Zip's room, back in realtime. The eye of
the world blinked and he was home.

The room was empty. Strand looked outside and saw Zip rushing
away through the parking lot, off to make his throw.

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Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg have collaborated in recent years on dozens of
stylish stories such as the following vision of how some people truly represent
timeless aspects of humanity.

Orleans, Rheims,
Friction: Fire

By Kathe Koja &

Barry N, Malzberg

IN THE CELL: AND THE

Dauphin close to her, wet breath,
odor of teeth and robes the odor of
death itself: is this what she wanted?
France, yes, a kind of salvation she had called it but was it not extinction
in another dress, reek of loam and excrescence to bury her along with the
prayers? and now her death was the Dauphin, leaning against her, taking
her small hand in his fist.

"It is not too late," that breath, those hands. "You must pray, you may
find remission, you must ask by all the tokens of light for the grace of the
Saviour Himself — "

The Saviour himself? and what does this clownish, duped and poi-
soned man, sunk into an indifference so profound it masks as faith know
of the Saviour? She herself knows nothing but feels, ah, feels like sun on
the skin the search and bum of those eyes, that dense and bloody forehead:
at every step, every station betrayal seeps through the centuries, death is
always death and screams are screams are the screams of disbelief and

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

hatred as the true Saviour, stripped now of all radiance, shrieks from the
vault of his emptiness Why have you forsaken me?

It is finished.

Yes, finished: finished for Jeanne too, all these hours in the dark have
brought to her a bleak and blacker light and, preparing to present to the
Dauphin that inextinguishable truth — that in giving herself to what she
thought was France she has only rehearsed the last, disastrous discovery
of Christ, that He had sacrificed Himself — oh God forgive but it is so,
every instant, every dull dead beat of her dying heart knows it is so — given
Himself to nothing and she as well: as here in this place, boxed nave
become not only her cell but the shape of her heart she feels the Dauphin's
hands upon her, the two of them grasping, small and rhythmic squeezing
and through the establishing rhythm of that grasp the flutter and beat of
his pulse, counterpoint upon her wrist and as she stares at him then, pale
with blasphemy unuttered, she tumbles trapdoor to another understand-
ing: beyond France, beyond the stations, beyond the bereaved and apostasaic
Jesus Himself she sees the receding glow of what had come upon her in the
fields, small terrible radiance which had seized her just as she fears in the
next reflexive movement of his hands the Dauphin will seize her and take
her station by station past the portals of her own damage, into the lie of
light which had so enpooled her,

"Pray," says the Dauphin to Jeanne, "let us pray."

On the porch, caught not in prayer but some attitude of distant
witness, ironic supplication: on the porch, tilting on the boards, feeling
the liquor rise inside and Joan on this false veranda too high for the house,
blurred, drizzling dark and she alone, all alone in T-shirt and silk skirt
blowing white smoke at the rain. How could she have come here? what did
she want? Silver light on the distant comer, street light and inside the
party reeling on, stupid role-playing party, stupid game: L' Histoire
Concrete or who am I? Perhaps the real question ought to be Who was I?
but not here, not now because the game must be played: ask of others the
questions, find out who you are and each guest assigned their little roles,
a piece of paper slapped on her back as she walked in the door: gotcha, gotcha
now. She had cheated, calmly cheated in front of everyone and not for the first
time: JEANNE D'ARC plucked from behind to stare and then replace and the
man in the black jacket, put on a collar and he could have been a priest.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

smirking and defrocked and asking archly "Don't you believe in fair play? "

Foreplay, did you sayl smartass Joan in her school play might have
asked but that was a long time ago, she did not say things like that now,
said nothing at all because anyone could see he meant to pick her up,
would more than likely make his move as soon as he knew for certain she
was here alone but soon is as good as never because St. Joan of the Flowers,
St. Joan of Chavez Ravine is not going to let him do it, is not in fact even
listening to his pitch. What can he say — even given a collar — worth the
time it takes to hear it? Despite the stupid jacket (and maybe he meant it
to be stupid, maybe he's smarter than he looks, than she thinks) he could
almost be attractive but not to her, not tonight, not ever; she is not going
to fuck him or anybody, not up or down, not in or out: tonight she is
definitely going home alone.

Nothing like an ashtray on the porch, fenced by walls from the house
but part of the screen curls outward, faint mesh unglued from its nails,
hanging in the drizzle and she bends to stuff the cigarette butt through that
hole, send it falling into the wet black below, no sound, no hiss, no nothing
but the dark and she is tired, tired and chilled from that rain and the dark,
barely midnight but the thought of going home exhausts as surely as the
thought of going back in. True name: why bother? Jeanne d'Arc had
visions but this Joan of Chavez Ravine has only glimmerings, snapshots
of embarrassment or anguish; this Joan has no terror of blasphemy because
this Joan knows she has been fucked good and proper forever and long ago
and so in defeat, in silence she lights another cigarette, procession of
tapers leading her toward her indistinguishable night and she smokes and
thinks of nothing, of everything: of the stretch and curl of time escaped,
chronology sprinkled like stars through her memory, rhistoire concrete
as concrete as an animal's gaze, a broken body, the drip and slip and slither
of water down a warped and broken screen to pool like blood in her own
empty abscess of memory and of loss.

The walls of the prison are always wet here, wet like the fields in
stricken autumn, ribbons and droplets, prisoners' tears. Witch's sweat,
says the old warder, a pious man unable to look her clearly in the eye: he
wears his keys like a churchman wears a cross and "See?" he says,
gesturing to the water, "see how it shines? It shines like blood, like your
tears, like your stinking heart, witch, soon enough." And then into his

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

prayers, all night she can hear him chanting, sometimes affixing broken
pieces of the Mass to his misquotation and in the pater nosier of his
murmurs she can hear the ripe curses of Orleans. Her soul will burn as
brightly within his piety as it will in the center of the Dauphin's disbelief,
her soul will bum everywhere, all the flames and fires of France leaping
from her windowed self: witch: soon enough.

And she says nothing, adding the warder's name to that long list
which lives within her, the ones for whom she must pray: the indifferent,
the evil, the liars, the silent, the ones who say this thing and mean
another, the sheep and the sheep and the goats. A sheep's wool smells
musty in moisture like this, rain like the rain she hears falling outside:
death all around her from the skies and inward from the fire, a long, long
time since she has walked thus, wet grass to hiss in motion like the gown
of a fine lady, fine Joan, elegant Joan with a sound of silk and arch of bosom.
Not my lady soldier in her boots and gauntlets, leading her weary horse,
her weary men, how did it happen so? Witch, witch, the tower warder's
laughter or perhaps it is she who makes the sound, uneven breath the
rachet whisper of that laugh. Oh, go back, make the journey, think again:
one day crouched small amidst hummocks and gray skies, counting her
beads on her fingers, here Mary, here Michael, here the lower blessed
saints and the muted grumble of the flock entrusted and the next the
center of men who followed as simply, as singly as the sheep, her name
their ave, her living flesh their standard: oh how had such a thing ever
happened to her? Voices, they said, she hears voices, she hears the voice
of God Himself telling her what to do: but that was wrong: the voices were
one thing, instructions, directions, those she had been eager to follow,
obey the light behind their light: but not God, never God, never that
unmediated ave, the cry of God resounding but instead — and what had
she done, what evil made manifest in her own clumsy work for good that
she should be so persecuted — instead to her the stricken, the betrayed,
the slowly evaporating Christ stumbling on the stones and whispering his
frightened cries into her heart, cries then to pass through the filters of her
own station and become instead a claim for France, salve Franco, salve
Gaul and it was this, the whimpers of the betrayed Jesus, which had at last
so fully told her exactly not what she must do but what she was, had
become, had always been even there in the fields and the water no less
than here in the water and the stone: there might as well have been no God

FANTASY SCIENCE FICTION

at all, God hung somewhere behind the shroud of sky and his disciples as
unquestioning as her own, her followers his, his Son her passport to this
abandonment, the rest only brute forms of men surrounding her, carrying
her to her own place, the place inside the fire.

And yet the rain, slow and steady on the walls to press upon her as did
the pressure of prayer inside her head, that unvoiced cry, that voiced
desire, blood in the bone, bone in the body, body a prison of bones made
of terror and desire, the same desire which had nailed Christ to the cross
of wood: to escape the void and the darkness, to do the work of the Lord.

''Hi again," near-silent hiss of the screen door, beside her now on the
porch the unfrocked priest with a drink for her, a glass of pink champagne.
"Oh, you should hear them," he says, handing her the glass which she
accepts to set at once upon the porch, between her feet without comment
or thanks. "They're going nuts in there, Martin Luther's arguing free will
with Marilyn Monroe."

"Marilyn Monroe's not a real person," she says. ''Image concrete, no?"

"Well," he says after a pause, "she's supposed to be real. Anyway
there they are, the two of them, made for each other." His smile a
supplicant's slyness, churchman's smile, warder's wink: "I think he's
trying to score off her," he says. "Nail her to the wall."

"Better that than a cross."

"Well," and another pause. "It's just a game, right?" He smiles at her,-
her nipples are hard from the rain and the chill, she sees, feels him staring
and "Stop looking at my tits," not bothering to turn away, to hide herself:
why hide from him, what does he know? "Women hate that; / hate it. Stop
it."

Stillness: the sound of the rain: does he like the acknowledgement
that he has disturbed her, reached her, or is all of this simply beyond him?
"They've got everyone almost figured out, concrete," he says calmly, a
little subdued, looking out as does she at the darkness. "Martin Luther,
Henry Ford, Marie Antoinette — "

"Marilyn Monroe."

"Marilyn Monroe, right," and grateful he nods, smiles, forgiven, "and
Bette Davis and Edgar Allan Poe and foe DiMaggio," gently tapping his
own chest, "and Joan of Arc." Looking at her, making the little smile big.
"I thought it was, was intriguing, what you did," touching the piece of

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

paper, yellow note still stuck to her back, replaced. "'That you looked, you
know, at who you were."

More rain, tiny breeze to move her skirt, port-wine color, the color of
blood. How late is it now? is it late enough? is it time to go home, can she
leave now? Is it over? From his jacket, that ugly jacket the odor of cigarette
smoke and perfume, his own odor, skin-smell ubiquitous as the flesh
itself, fleshly priest, carnal priest among his lost congregation, warm meat
to carry the oldest smell of all, that cold, bold retention amidst the stones
of night but: no, that other Joan died a virgin, bride only to the fire and this
Joan knows secrets of another kind.

"It's important," she says, looking straight at him, all eyes, one stare
as reflexively he retreats, one step back and two and "It's important,"
again, insistent, "to know who you are. People forget. Who knows about
Joan of Arc today? How many knew who she was at the time?" And what
is it to you? she thinks, old knowledge, old fire, who knows where all the
bodies are buried and burned? "We can only forget," she says, eyes wider
now, "the movement of life is toward forgetfulness and the failure of
memory. That's how it's meant to be. That's how it has to be, " forward the
march into the darkness, the light one dies reflecting consumed as well to
darkness by that fire, it is all she knows, all she needs to know and he says
something about this, false priest, priest of folly murmuring against the
rising rain, mutter like a voice between her eyes,- the offering hand, the
pink champagne and this time she takes it, holds it, stem and circle in her
hand, leaping streaming bubbles like angels dancing in the night, halo and
firmament as he leans a little closer, just a little closer still, just close
enough so she can hear the murmur of the echo of the memory of the heat,
dark and concealed, meat on the bone to rise like sparks in the center of
his own supplicating fire.

O THEY FEED her but only a little: weeviled bread
but not much, a watery drink they call with heavy
laughter the Dauphin's toast. After a long wait during
which she tries to think of nothing, no Golgotha, no
Saviour, no blasphemy, no loss, they come to take her before the tribunal,
men wrapped in deep cloaks against the ruinous cold, it is very cold yet the
water on the walls continues to flow, beads to drip and run, witch's sweat.
You are a witch, they tell her.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

No,

You hear the voice of the Devil speaking to you. You hear many voices
because the Devil speaks in all tongues. It is Satan who has driven you on.

No.

You are a tool and accompanist of Satan, you bear the wound of evil
in your soul, you have incited to treason and death men whose lives by
those deaths have been made evil, whose deaths first describe and then
damn them eternally: their blood is on your hands.

No. You do not understand —

You have called to Satan in the fields and he has possessed you totally
and you have in turn possessed those men.

No, no, no.

This continues. Scholars all their attempt is to distort and debate,
twist her own words to make confusion, trap her, trip her, make her lie;
she will not lie. Mary and Michael, the water on the walls, she could no
more lie than could the sheep. You are going to burn, they tell her and that
at least is true: that is what one does with a witch, a sorceress, no? You
crucify a God, stone a saint, burn a witch. They call her a witch; very well
then, she will burn.

The Dauphin at one time might have been expected to help her, might
have been relied upon, watched for and awaited if he were more of a ruler and
less of a child but inside he will always be a child. Some men are like this, has
she not found this to be so? Tell them what is to be done and in their empty
spaces, from their absence they will offer only assent: not so? Of course. Yes.
Yes. There will be no aid from the Dauphin, no aid from the men in the cloaks
who at any rate are bent on burning, no aid from the jailers or the other
prisoners or the men who live or the men who died, died in battle, died in
blood and fire, shrieks and prayers and at last in a kind of suppressed fury the
questioning ends and she is allowed to leave, to be taken back to her cell where
she is pushed to fall on hands and knees, where she keeps that posture to pray,
head low, on all fours like an animal who does not raise its eyes to the master,
who crawls across the stones, snaffling and breathing the water of its own
sweat, who waits for the master's hand to bring punishment or pleasure,
death or life, the water or the fire.

" — but without her deposit they wouldn't refund it," he says, "and
I, I was going to try to make it up but I just couldn't, you know, at that time

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

I couldn't really afford it." Touching her arm with the green lip of the
champagne bottle, bare arm, wet glass; so cold, so bold, so old. "You want
some of this?"

"No. I don't want any of it."

"But anyway, " pouring for himself, elbow nudging hers, "she and I are
friends again now, at least I think we are, I think it's good to stay friends.
Don't you? To be friends, to try to — "

"Garbage," she says. "No. None of it."

"Not good to be friends?"

"No," she says, "there are no friends. Only the concrete, and phan-
toms all around it."

"Mmm," he says, "thoughtful," and lights another cigarette for her,
uses the motion to put that arm around her, lightly, oh so lightly but she
feels it like iron, iron warm from the body enslaved and she knows she
should turn to him, stare at him, tell him to get his stupid arm away.. .but
oh the cold, the rain and that cold, dark passage of time so heavy all around
her and he keeps talking, warm body, flickering heat seen only through
closed eyes and his moving lips, talking and telling her all sorts of things.
Ex-girlfriends, ex-wife, all the women who are all still his friends and
"Don't you think," he says, arm so firm and steady, so soft that murmur
in the brain it could be her own voice conflated, "don't you think that
making love, really making love is the best way to know a person? I mean
really know them, know them all the way down; know what they're like,
what they want, what they need? This is the way we touch, the way we
communicate and I say when — "

"No," at once and brutal, "no, I don't. I don't believe in any of that.
That's just another kind of scrap you're trying to put on my back, just
another stupid note, that's all." Oh, what they need, what they need: fire
and water, water running from the gutters, beading on the screen, is there
enough fire in all the world to quench that water now? Her voice again but
more quietly, as if her mouth has frozen, her lips so stiff and cold and "You
want to know what I think? I think your making love is just a cheap
euphemism for fucking and I don't think fucking solves anything or
changes anything or makes anything happen but fucking and I think
pretending anything else is just a lie, just a soft or hard lie depending on
whether you're moving in or moving out because it's friction, it's all just
friction." Shaking now, little hurt in her chest, big hurt from something

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

else echoed and echoing and '"It's all a lie/' she says, "you're just a voice
in my head. You're a voice in your own head, and none of it means
anything at all to you, all you want is the heat, that's what I think. It's all
a lie," she repeats pointlessly.

He says nothing. His hands are very warm.

She hears the voice as light in her head.

Nothing.

"You see," says the monsignor, his mouth still greasy from the
medianoche, chicken grease, chicken bone, "you see, my daughter. Our
Lord is very good to you. He has blessed you after all and beyond what you
deserve: He has taken those voices from you. He has given you this silence
in which to contemplate your repentance. He has freed you from the grip
of the devil so that you might recant your evil and name your collabora-
tors. Come, my daughter, make full and free confession," hands wiping
quickly, fingers shiny on his robe, "come back to the arms of the Lord and
it will be as if you had never left."

"I want a dress, " she says, pulling with stiff fingers at her clothing, the
same filthy breeches and white shirt gone gray worn when last she battled
for God and St. Michael, for the ruined and ruinous Dauphin, for betraying
France. "I want to wash myself, I want to be clean." Let me stand in the
rain, she thinks. Let me stand in the rain as I stood in the fields with my
sheep, hearing the voices for the first time: they were so sure, she was so
sure then. Her head feels so light and hot but to the touch of her palms it
is cool, almost cold, cold like the dead and "Let me," she says, "let me
stand in that rain until I am clean, until I cannot smell my own body like
some dead sheep lost from the sheepfold, until the heat is gone and the
body shrinks and all the fire dies."

The monsignor says nothing more to her then or at least she does not
hear it but they do bring women's clothing, not that shift and apron with
which she is familiar but such as she has never seen. Oh how complicated
and magnificent these garments, the garments of a proud woman and she
has never worn anything like this in all her life and besides she will not
strip there in front of the guards, she will not do this. "Go away," she says
to the monsignor who has returned, "make them all go away. I want to be
with my God and with myself."

"But my daughter," says the monsignor, "this should not be neces-

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

sary. In the field they say you ate and slept and relieved yourself in full
view of your men, you lived the life of a soldier yourself, is that not so?
Why now is it different?"

How can she tell them? How can she talk of the arc of the empty field
and the cries of the men, the standard flowing before her, how can she tell
them when there is only silence in her head, her hot and aching brain; why
should the voices leave her now, now when she is trying so hard like the
sweet, damaged Christ lurching from stone to stone, begging for remis-
sion, for absolution, for meaning on the cross, trying so hard to be good,
to do what is right: why now? and the monsignor's stare, the warders
beyond and at last, crouched like a child with the clothing in her arms at
last she breaks, weeping mouth open like an urchin in the streets, huge
wet sobs so her body shakes, vagrant lump of flesh shuddering and
trembling like a standard in the wind and one of the warders makes a
sound, chuffing cough of disgust or dismay and "Let her be," he says, "let
her be. She is only a child, " and they all withdraw, the monsignor defeated,
the warders perhaps in shame, how can she know? She is only a child: she
is not yet eighteen, she has forgotten that, sometimes it seems as if she has
lived forever.

They are all gone now, gone away and she alone, all alone, all alone
in the black vast cathedral of the scream, of her empty heart, of her silent
body burning now, burning from the inside out and after the weeping
comes a state of voicelessness, comes then a silence so enormous it seems
it will crush her to death where she lies against the stones, crush her to
rags to lie beside those other rags.

Rags and distemper, brackish water and renunciation, forgive, Father,
it is finished: those lady's clothes the assumption of which is beyond her,
those lady's clothes that after some time a warder comes to take away,
remove from beside her as if a cross too heavy for her frailty, her sickness,
her narrowed sorrow to bear.

At least she thinks it is a warder but as it had been in the fields when
first they spoke to her, it could have been God Himself.

"You're so cold," he says, he whispers,- her T-shirt is damp, damp silk
below, everything wet and cold and time brings nothing but the pressure
of chronology to crush the living into the dead, the dead into the dead,
Marilyn Monroe into Martin Luther, Jeanne into Joan into France into fire,

FANTASY A SCIENCE FICTION

everything smashed at last to silent fossils, small detritus, little chunks
of bone and stone and rock over which that tricked and suffering Saviour
can crawl, the defrocked priest can stroke, those places that no heat can
ever conquer nor God resurrect: his hands are on her breasts but she can
barely feel them, his clumsy mouth against her neck and '"Let me," he
says, "oh let me, let me — " like the rags on the pile, heat the cold and
curtain, pile the wood around her like a temple or a home: let it go, her own
voice and no other's inside her head, let it burn, let it go.

S SHE BURNS the rains continue to fall. Breeches
and stained shirt and oh, see her smiling; someone in the
crowd is screaming We have burned a saintl but most of
them just watch, too stunned by their own wretched-
ness yet laved by the burning, finding less than a moment's true diversion
in her death. Away they will turn as soon as she is gone, they will resume
like a rucksack their own unhappiness and it seems to her that the pain
— which is worse, even, than the voices advised her, those voices at last
returned like water in the desert, like manna in the mouth, honey in the
horn of self, warm hands to hold hers in the terror and the cold, cold as the
body on the stones of Gethsemane, the waters running out, the casting of
lots, the dark and the noise of the soldiers: that pain is for all its magnitude
a kindly figure as it strokes and strokes her body with iron claws, claws
as clear as water, bright and hopeful claws to claim her and make her their
own: just she and the shape of God itself, hammered to the stones and
flying wood.

"What's your real name? " that closed-in voice, eyes closed as her own
are open to watch: see: feel that rhythm against her thigh, rubbing and
butting, heat against rock against cold and "What's your real name, your
true name?" as he plucks at her nipples, as inside the house — shielded
from them by walls, three silent walls and a silent door — something, a
bottle, a body falls to shatter and somebody laughs, oh laughs so loudly as
the rain becomes words in her mind, voices an endless ribbon like the
ribbon of time turning back, helix, on itself, turning and twisting like the
flesh to the fire and "What's your real name?" but oh, not now, not again,
the fire next time but this time only the rubbing, the inflation, the

ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE

murmur insidious of that voice and "That's me/' she says into the sound
of the water, her own voice a little cough, a croak, death's welcoming peep
in the terror and the cold, cold as the body on the stones of Gethsemane,
the waters running out, the casting of lots, the dark and the noise of the
soldiers and "That's me, it was always me," as his fingers stroke her, as
she pushes her body against his, seeking the friction that brings the
motion that brings, might bring, must bring at last as the bowl of heaven
inverts, as the cauldron of mind empties to fill again with the blood
inexorable of the inescapable self: must bring at last the fire.

/ have seen it all before, said the Dauphin, and held high the flag from

School may be out for the summer, but that doesn’t mean that the problems we
have with our educational systems are going away. Far from it...

fake West is a new writer living in Torrance. California. He and his partner
are finishing up their first novel while also working on some screenplays.

Halls of Burning

By Jake West

Arrival:

HE UV DOME OVER THE

parking lot is in sight.

Merely a block away, Roger
Stenner sits in his car at a dead-stop,
clenching and unclenching the steering wheel in much the same way that
the ghostly fingers of his frustrations squeeze the pit of his stomach. He
is very late for work again, so late that he is now caught by a seemingly
endless river of students converging on Rodney King Memorial High
School. For a teacher, getting caught in the last-minute rush would have
guaranteed his own tardiness once upon a time, but now he has some slim
hope: the metal-detectors and the epidermal drug-scanners slow them
down these days. If he can make a simple left turn into the gated staff-only
access street, he can still beat his First Period English students to the
classroom.

Bemie waves to him from inside the transparent Security booth,
obviously recognizing his aging '98 Quark. Stenner would be willing to bet
that any parking lot frequented by high-school teachers harbors a much

HALLS OF BURNING

higher percentage of old, ex-gas-burners like his than, say, a comparable
garage used by bank executives. Or School Board politicians. It still costs
a lot less to install batteries than to buy a brand new electric.

There was a time when Bernie would have stepped out of the booth
to halt the flow of kids for a second and give him a chance to drive through,
but that time belongs to the past. Bemie is even less likely to unseal his
locks than Roger is to try nosing the car forward through the crosswalk,
even with a standard feature like bulletproof glass in his windows.

So, instead, he waits through the five-minute warning buzzer and the
shrill echo of the final bell in the distance. Even then, it takes a few more
minutes for the exodus to dry up, allowing Bemie to trigger the barricade.
It rolls aside, and Roger Stenner finally makes his simple left turn,
quickly, almost furtively, pulling into the side-street before some juvenile
straggler can sneak through. He thinks, as he does so, that tomorrow he
will be here early. That tomorrow will be different.

The problem is, he thinks that every day.

The Parking Lot:

Most people keep their mirrorshades on until they get inside the
building. They do this as a safety precaution — after all, the old parking
lot is exposed to the sun, despite the filter dome that the school district
put over it — but it also gives them a kind of uniform anonymity as they
arrive and file in through the security-locks. Most of the staff have
noticed, consciously or unconsciously, and without really discussing it
amongst themselves, that lately there is an advantage to maintaining a
low profile. Specifically, since the recent change in administrative re-
gimes. Since long-time Vice-Principal and Dean of Students Phillip
Ligotti ascended to the Papal Throne behind the Principal's desk.

Today Stenner has lost that advantage since, reflective visor or not, he
is the last teacher left in the parking lot. And newly ordained Principal
Ligotti walks up behind him while he is fumbling with his briefcase in the
back seat. Stenner flinches and hesitates: Ligotti is a person he would
recognize without even turning around and whether he was wearing
mirrorshades or not, because Ligotti has an artificial servo-motor implant
in his right knee, and it makes a tiny but perceptible whirring sound when
he walks, sort of like C-3PO in the old Star Wars movies. Stories vary

FANTASY A SCIENCE FICTION

wildly as to the origin of his injury, all the way from a Purple Heart in the
Ukraine Action to a student riot during the South Central Secession to a
really lurid one involving a bad divorce and a flight of stairs. Also, the
implant causes him to throw his leg oddly when he walks, and other
stories speculate that he doesn't get the gyro fixed because he likes the
psychological effect of the limp — slow, deliberate, remorseless. Intimi-
dating to staff and students alike.

All of this flashes through Stenner's mind in that split-second when
he knows that he is caught and he decides on his strategy. Apology?
Excuses? The hell with it. He goes for the bluff.

"Oh, hi, Phillip," he tosses off casually while finally retrieving the
briefcase. He straightens up and turns to face Ligotti's perpetually flat,
unreadable expression: not quite a scowl and never a smile. "Kind of
smoggy for a walk, though. Campus quiet this morning?"

"You don't have time for small talk. Mister Stenner." Ligotti has a
voice like a foghorn that smokes too much. "Second bell rang ten minutes
ago."

"Sorry, sir. I didn't realize." Mister Stenner, huh? Okay. Message
received.

Ligotti grunts noncommittally and starts to turn away. As he does so,
Stenner looks past him and catches a glimpse of another person hurrying
toward the building. From the back, it appears to be the slender shape of
Dana Alexander, the new Social Studies teacher whom, so far, he has only
seen from afar. In another moment, Principal Ligotti will see her, and, on
impulse, Stenner frowns and points in the opposite direction.

"Damn! There goes another one, Mr. Ligotti."

"Huh? What — ?" Awkwardly, the older man swerves around, nearly
losing his balance.

"Behind those cars. Right through there — see him? " Stenner plays it
carefully now that he has Ligotti's attention, not too overdone.

"Another streaker?"

Stenner nods. "Well, on rollerblades, at least. And it looked like he
had a spray can to me. How do these kids keep getting in here, anyway?"

He starts after the imaginary trespasser, but Ligotti waves him back.
"Take your class, Mr. Stenner. I'll handle this."

"Okay, sir. Good luck." Stenner grins to himself as he hurries after

HALLS OF BURNING

the elusive Ms. Alexander, who has already cycled through the outer lock.
It occurs to him that if he catches up, he can use the favor he just did for
her as a great opening line.

Behind him, the whine of Principal Ligotti's knee increases in pitch
as he lumbers away. Like a juggernaut starting to roll downhill into the
enemy, accelerating as he goes.

The Access Corridor:

"I always feel like a rat in here.'" This is certainly not the first thing
that Stenner means to say to her, and he even surprises himself when it
slips out.

No less surprised, apparently, is Dana Alexander. "I beg your par-
don?'' she replies, her eyes wide and her eyebrows raised apprehensively.
He can see her taking a mental step back from him.

"You know what I mean." Flustered, but hiding it, he tries to recover
his poise. "They built these damn tunnels so narrow, there's hardly
enough room for two people to walk side by side in here." He drops his
voice to a sinister pitch. "Or maybe it's the way you can hear the muffled
voices from the classrooms as you scurry along behind the walls..." He
grins to let her know that he is joking.

"Well, I heard this old place was built clear back in the Sixties," she
says.

"Yeah, about four decades and three name-changes ago." Meaning
that, unlike the newer campuses, which are designed and built with the
teacher-only access policies firmly in mind. King Memorial had to be
converted over when the Isolation Principle went into effect. In this case,
they had to move walls and shave a few feet from existing classrooms to
create these claustrophobic passageways. "By the way. I'm Roger Stenner, "
he says, extending his hand.

"Dana Alexander." She juggles a couple of books to return his
handshake as they rush along. Her grip is remarkably firm.

"You owe me a cup of coffee, Dana."

"Oh, really? Why?" He can't quite tell if she is annoyed or amused
with him, although he is fairly certain that's a smile she is trying to
suppress. Either way, he's getting a reaction.

"A word to the wise, since you're new here. Our beloved Principal

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Ligotti likes to take these little inspection tours' around the school,
especially first thing in the morning. You know, on the lookout for really
Big Stuff. Like drug deals and vandalism and teachers who are running
late..."

"Oh, hell. Was he out there this morning?"

"Don't worry. I distracted him."

"My hero."

"Not really. He was just too busy chewing out my butt to notice you
were there."

She laughs as they reach the T-junction where they will separate
toward their respective classrooms. "Seriously, Roger — thanks. I didn't
need a slap on the wrist my second week here." She flashes a smile at him
over her shoulder as she walks away. "Nice to meet you."

"So, about that cup of coffee — " he calls after her.

"Roger! Tm late." She sounds exasperated.

"Hey, I'm just as late as you are. How about meeting me in the staff
lounge after Seventh Period?"

She stops and gives him a quizzical look. "Are you sure about this?"

"My God, it's not a marriage proposal."

"Okay, then." She is still giving him that enigmatic appraisal, as if
suddenly recognizing him as a celebrity she cannot quite place. "After
school." And she takes off.

Down the opposite end of the corridor, Stenner reaches the spiral
metal staircase that leads to his second-floor classroom. Halfway up the
rungs, he pauses to give her a last appreciative glance, and a voice directly
below him says: "I've seen that look before. Is it true love or just lust?"

"What are you, McNeill? Hall monitor?" He looks down at the Math
teacher's balding and sunburned scalp. It annoys Stenner that a person
who has his prep time during First Period — and thus, who could be late
every morning — is the only teacher in the whole school who is chroni-
cally early.

"Sorry." McNeill holds up his hands as he walks away. "You just
didn't seem like the type."

Before he has a chance to ask what that strange comment means (the
type for what?), Stenner reaches the top of the stairs.

HALLS OF BURNING

The Classroom:

These days, teachers make theatrical entrances: stepping through the
wall from hidden passages, rising up through the floor from trapdoors
behind desks. Stenner has sometimes thought of appearing in a puff of
smoke as he ascends into his classroom, but this current generation,
raised on virtual reality and spazzjazz, probably wouldn't even understand
the reference. Besides, the smoke would fill up the tiny plastic cubicle that
contains his workspace — desk and computer terminal — with a choking
cloud that would keep him from seeing their reactions.

Not that he can see them much better this morning: some smartass
has sprayed his booth on the studentside with ugly and incoherent
decorations, leaving a few gaps here and there for him to see through.
Tagging; they used to call it. Now it's called scars, and this example seems
to consist mostly of gang signs and other territorial posturing — the
human equivalent of dogs pissing on trees to mark their territories, in his
opinion — with a few choice obscenities written backwards for his benefit
so that he can read them from inside the booth and thus enjoy their
sentiments.

"Very funny," he says through his speakers to the rising wave of
hysteria in the room. Stenner can feel his lips compressing into a thin,
angry line, but he carefully wipes all expression off his face as he drops his
mirrorshades and briefcase on the desk and assesses the damage. Actually,
he is surprised that the paint hasn't already sloughed off the nearly-
frictionless surface that was developed to cope with this decades-old
problem. Thinking that maybe it is still fresh, he touches the keyboard
command that will fire an electrostatic pulse through the bulletproof
polymer and speed up the process of repelling the graffiti.

And nothing happens.

"It's monobond, you jerk!" a nasal voice shouts anonymously from
the back, and the laughter explodes again, this time with an especially
nasty undertone. Great. Stenner remembers reading somewhere about
this new stuff, a molecule-thin paint guaranteed to cover in a single coat,
that works by literally becoming the surface to which it is applied.
Neither cheap nor easily available, it certainly wasn't bought at the local
hardware store. Looks like somebody has jacked a construction site
recently.

FANTASY at SCIENCE FICTION

Why is it that every improvement in life just seems to give the punks
a nevsr weapon? A sudden wave of disgust for a world where elaborate
countermeasures are both necessary and so increasingly pointless threat-
ens to sweep him away. Instead of surrendering to it, however, he sits
down at his terminal, enters his suspicions in Security's database and puts
a red flag on it. Then he E-mails Maintenance regarding the ruined cubicle,
though he will never lay eyes on a work crew during school hours. Only
the Security chops would come in with students present, so he resigns
himself to a day with limited visibility. In fact, he will be lucky if what is
popularly known among teachers as "the shark cage" is replaced by
tomorrow.

"Very clever, whoever's responsible. Very articulate, too. By the way,
there's no 'u' in mother." Sarcasm is lost on most of this audience, but it
makes him feel better anyway. "Now, I want all of you to access page 134
in the textbook and do the interactive with me at the end, when you've
finished reading the chapter — All right, that's ENOUGH!" Suddenly, he
thunders at them by cranking up the volume to a technically illegal level,
cutting through all the noise and chaos. Instantly, the room quiets down
into a sort of shocked, grudging silence.

He glares at them through the broken arms of a crudely drawn
swastika. "Everybody in their seats — now," he says at a more normal
level, and most of them comply. "This means you, too. Mister Gorman."

"Hey, I still got business to conduct here. Do you mind?"

"Tell it to the chops. Mister Gorman. Or sit down. Your choice."
Stenner makes himself sound bored, but his hand hovers over the call-
button, and the kid knows it. Finally, he struts back to his terminal and
slouches defiantly in his seat, smirking and making comments under his
breath that cause a ripple of smirks around him.

His point made, Stenner ignores them, and, realizing that the show's
over, the group regains some resemblance to an English class, though, as
he slides into the rhythm of moving electronically from terminal to
terminal, remotely checking each student's work, correcting and com-
menting in real-time as he goes, Stenner feels an ongoing residue of
emotions in the room, compounded of anger and unfocused hatred from
some of them, frustration and boredom from others, contempt or amuse-
ment and especially much embarrassment over what happened. And fear.

HALLS OF BURNING

It is an intoxicating mix, almost a palpable odor to him. It fades as the
period draws to a close but is reflected in the quality of the work, all the
way from the kids who did nothing to the sincere efforts, like LaWanda
Siddons at Terminal 17, who made some genuinely insightful observa-
tions on Stephen Crane's use of simile and metaphor. Stenner types a
few, quick lines of feedback to her, wishing that he had time to give her
more.

Wishing that he could talk to her face-to-face. Stenner only had one
year of teaching at the beginning of his career before Isolation. Today he
misses the freedom of that year more acutely than ever: the freedom to
lecture without pacing back and forth behind a barricade, to walk among
his students and ignite a rousing discussion, or to be close enough to
actually see that lightning bolt of understanding in their eyes when they
suddenly grasp an elusive concept. When they've been struggling to
understand something, and suddenly they Get It.

But that won't happen. The mechanics of the job are much different
now, and the rewards are proportionately less. So the period ends, and he
goes on with his day, which turns out to be a fairly commonplace day
otherwise. Oh, during Third Period, they hear shots fired down the hall,
and Security slaps a computer-lock on their door, but nothing significant
comes of it. Just to be safe, Stenner keeps a closer eye than usual on the
system-wide updates, but no deaths are reported on campus, and Intelli-
gence assigns a low probability to the Violence Index.

In short, other than the graffiti in his classroom, a quiet day.

The Incident:

Until the graffiti saves his life.

He never finds out what causes the battle. Perhaps it is related to those
earlier gunshots, or possibly somebody is offended by the gang-signs that
prevent his clear view of the room. Maybe he would have been able to see
it coming with better visibility. Instead, all he knows is that open warfare
erupts between two students during Fourth Period, the kind that often
results in gunplay, accompanied by the usual screaming, ducking and
panicked stampede — with an important difference. One of the combat-
ants is armed with something much worse than a 9mm popper, something
that proves Stenner's earlier suspicions about stolen construction gear.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

The kid has a laser spot-welder, modified for the street. It is a hand-
held job, pumped to deliver its entire charge in a single pulse, burning out
the emitter in the process.

In other words, it only fires once, but that one shot can be lethal as
hell.

If it connects, that is. The intended target flings himself over a desk,
and the shot misses him completely. It scores a direct hit on the front
panel of Stenner's security-booth, however, which is directly in the line
of fire.

Under other circumstances, Stenner would have been dead instantly.
Instead, the monobond paint splashed across the plastic in front of him
stops the beam for a heartbeat. He looks up in time to see a hot-spot flash
incandescent in the paint a split-second before it bums through at chest
level. What he does next has nothing to do with conscious reasoning, or
even an awareness of what the flash means. It is an action born of pure
instinct, and it is exactly the right thing to do to save his own life.

He grabs his mirrorshades off the desk and holds them up. Before they
melt, their reflective surface scatters the laser back into the room,
dazzling the students left in the front row.

The shooter gets the worst of it, though. Much of the coherent light
bounces straight back at him, badly scorching his face. His hair bursts into
flame, and he stumbles out the door, blinded and shrieking. He is already
gone by the time the fire-control system kicks in, dousing everyone else
and shorting out most of the terminals.

Excluding Stenner's there in the cage. The general announcement it
displays a few minutes later — that his classes are cancelled for the rest
of the day — is overridden on his screen by an urgent personal message
from Administration.

Stenner gets an old, funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. It has been
many years since he was last summoned to:

The Principal's Office:

"If the lawsuits don't ruin us, the publicity will."

The damage control party in Ligotti's office surrounds him like a
tribunal of the Inquisition. Except that the clerics have been replaced by
law-clerks and dogma by spin-doctors. Instead of heresy, they are looking

HALLS OF BURNING

for liability these days. And violations of political correctness, which is
just a modem kind of dogma.

For a couple of hours, now, he has answered all their questions: Who
started — ? When did you — ? What if you had — ? While throughout the
interrogation — because that is exactly what it is — Principal Ligotti sits
tilted back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the
ceiling. Listening to the frenzied debate with his feet up on the desk, legs
crossed. Slowly, he wiggles his right foot back and forth, causing the
artificial knee to make a scratchy, insect sound, rhythmic as a cricket.
This twitch is the only barometer of the principal's true agitation.

Stenner sees this as a bad sign. Generally speaking, the quieter Phillip
Ligotti becomes, the worse it is.

'T was only defending myself," Stenner says mechanically for the
umpteenth time. "My God, it isn't like I planned to hurt the kid," he adds
this time around, but it is only a half-hearted protest. He is realizing that
facts will have nothing to do with the outcome of this.

"You don't understand our exposure, " the District rep tells him. He's
probably right. The political climate has been much different since the
Crip Party won their majority in the State Legislature.

"You're suspended, pending further investigation," Ligotti says
abruptly, dropping his chair legs back to the wooden floor with a thunk!
as final as a judge's gavel. "I'm sorry, Mr. Stenner, but I don't see that we
have any choice."

Stenner doesn't argue. Seventh Period has long since come and gone,
and he excuses himself more with relief than with righteous indignation.
Even though he should be worrying about how he is going to pay the rent
or pay for his own attorney, the only thing he can worry about right now
is whether or not Dana Alexander waited for him.

The Teacher's Lounge:

Apparently not.

The only person in the lounge is a man that he doesn't recognize:
blond guy, slender, narrow features. Who can keep up with the turnover
in this place?

Then the guy says: "Roger?"

"That's right." Stenner looks at him hard, wondering how he knows

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

his name, wondering if he should recognize him, and then the light dawns.
''Did Dana Alexander leave a message for me? I guess she couldn't stay,
huh?"

The blond gives him a quizzical look that is somehow oddly familiar,
as if he has seen it before, just recently. Just today, in fact. On another face.

"Oh, shit, Roger. You didn't know."

Stenner feels the blood drain from his own face. "Danal But — but —
you're a Social Studies teacher!" He blurts out the first stupid thing that
enters his mind.

"Alternative Lifestyles Specialist, actually." The other man smiles
sadly. "I thought this was too good to be true."

Stenner grins back sheepishly. "These things happen, I guess."

"Are you disappointed?"

"Oh, I'm okay." Stenner takes a step back, frantically searching for a
graceful exit line from an embarrassing situation. "Trust me. After the day
I've already had, things couldn't possibly get any worse."

Departure;

The police are waiting for him in the parking lot.

Late afternoon sun glints off the light-bar of the cruiser parked next
to his old Quark. A few staff people stare as they go past, then hurry a little
faster to their own cars.

One of the two officers — the older one — asks him his name and
informs him that he is under arrest. "For Reckless Endangerment of a
Minor and Irresponsible Response to Violence," he says and quotes the
penal codes, though Stenner senses his reluctance with what he is doing.

"Officer, you know this is wrong." Stenner is surprised at how calm
his voice sounds. "The kid took a shot at me"

The cop takes his arm and walks him a few steps away from the car.
"Look, I'm sorry, Mr. Stenner, but the boy's parents filed charges. We don't
have any choice."

"Christ, Vm the one who should be filing charges." But it goes
without saying that he can't. They both know that Stenner signed the
same waiver that every other public school teacher does when they take
the job.

"All I can tell you, sir, is that it will look better for you if you

HALLS OF BURNING

cooperate. Personally, I would advise you to think about all the implica-
tions." The cop jerks a thumb meaningfully at the audio pin-recorder
attached to his collar: That ’s all I can say on the record, pal. So what is he
really trying to tell him?

Stenner follows the officer's gaze down to the motorized barricade at
the end of the access street, and it all becomes clear to him.

Suddenly, he is very aware of what might be waiting for him on the
other side of that barrier — of how many friends the gang-banger in his
class might have, and what they might be planning in retaliation. And
where. And how leaving here in the company of armed policemen is, quite
possibly, the only way he might leave here alive.

"I see what you mean," he says and humbly, almost eagerly, extends
his arms for the handcuffs.

Unlike his students, Roger Stenner learns his lessons.*^

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Mercury Press, 143 Cream Hill Rd, West Cornwall, CT 06796

Rand B. Lee is a freelance writer and lecturer specializing in horticulture and
"New Age" topics. He lives with his blind husky mix, Moon-Pie, in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, where he serves as co-editor of The American Cottage Gardener and
president of The American Dianthus Society. He is also a wonderful fantasist who
writes fiction much too infrequently, so it's a real pleasure to introduce this new
story from him, which he notes is dedicated to his younger brother feffrey, who
died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 35.

The Green Man

By Rand B. Lee

WHEN JEFFREY ANDREW

Russell needed to escape his mother,
he hid in the old black Buick on the
edge of the far pasture, where the woods
began. The Buick had small dark windows and doors as heavy as coffin
lids. Long ago, the family had ridden around in it, but before feffrey was
seven someone had left it to sag into the soft Connecticut green. The
Buick's name was Vi, because its upholstery was gray-violet. His family
named all their cars, the way some people name their boats, or their
children. Except when he needed somewhere to hide, he avoided the
Buick, in part because dreaded spiders had come to live in the glove
compartment, but also because he had always thought of Vi as a sort of
person and now she was dead, which made him feel sad and desirous of
showing respect.

On the summer day the Green Man appeared to him for the first time,
it was very hot in the car. In deference to the spiders, he crouched in the
rotting back seat, making himself small, breathing shallowly and softly.

THE GREEN MAN

listening for the sound of his father's car horn in the driveway, which
would signal that it was safe to go back into the house. In a corner of the
windshield, a spindly-legged yellow jacket mumbled to itself. Outside,
the cicadas practiced their scales. The path through the pasture, which
was overgrown with black raspberry and thistle, remained empty, but this
was not to be trusted. He fought to stay awake and alert.

The heat was palpable. He began to nod and drowse, jerking upright
at imagined sounds of movement, then drowsing and nodding again.
Having drowsed once too often, he woke in a panic from a deep sizzling
sleep to find Vi darkened with the slant of late day. Cautiously he opened
the door, got out, and stood up directly under the gaze of a tall, broad-
shouldered figure standing not ten feet away in the forest fringe.

His first panicked thought was, Momf, but almost instantly he
realized that it was not his mother: it was a very dirty, very hairy bearded
man. His hair was black, and it grew all over him: long and matted on his
head, a tangle of beard hanging below the big nipples of his broad furry
chest, his penis and testicles dangling pale between the dark-pelted
columns of his legs. Late light spilling through the birches cast a green
glow over his shoulders and belly. His eyes were holes of shadow. Jeffrey
stared, not daring to twitch, but in the end he had to, and the instant he
did, the green man was gone, without a rustle of brush.

Jeffrey blinked, moved forward into the forest fringe, and listened, the
way he listened at the door of his bedroom for his mother's footstep on the
landing. "Hello?" he said, in what his mother would have called a stage
whisper. "I know you're there." He listened some more. The woods were
like lungs breathing in and out. Jeffrey had always steered clear of the
woods. He was afraid of the snakes which sunned themselves on the
summer trails, and he had heard somewhere that there were old bear traps
under the loam that could take your foot off at the ankle before you knew
what was happening. He was still standing there, undecided, when he
heard a car toot twice across the meadow.

He returned to the house with careful haste by the front door facing
the street, which only he and the Jehovah's Witnesses ever used. The
mountain laurel growing to one side was out of flower by now, its tiny
white sticky maroon-banded grails of blossom withered and fallen to the
sterile acid loam. From the foyer, he ascended the staircase which led to

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

the landing separating his bedroom from his parents'. He could hear the
clatter of dishes from the kitchen which meant that his mother was
preparing dinner. The clatter did not sound particularly quick or harsh; he
relaxed a bit. This meant she was not too angry at him for running away
from her. The television gabbled from the living room: the war in
Vietnam, as usual; Jeffrey's father, catching a few minutes of the early
news before dinner.

Jeffrey went into his bedroom with the Star Trek models suspended
by wires from the ceiling and lay on the blue corduroy cover of his bed. He
thought of the green man and felt excited in a way he could not name. The
man had felt wild to him, somehow, much wilder than the raccoons who
thudded every night from the pine tree onto the roof. Jeffrey had seen a
wild deer once. It had jumped into his father's headlights when they were
coming home from the movies in New Milford. His father had cursed and
slammed on the brakes. The deer had just stood there, and then it had
vanished, with no more sound than a goldfish makes in the goldfish bowl.
But the green man had seemed wilder even than this.

When his father called him to come down for dinner, he descended to
the kitchen by the second staircase on the other end of the house. His
mother was putting the finishing touches to a platter of cold roast beef and
sliced tomatoes, her broad back turned to him. His father was not there.
He felt a moment of panic. She had thick hair the color of field-mouse fur.
She always claimed she had eyes in the back of her head, and once again
she demonstrated the reasonableness of this: the moment he entered the
room she said in a quick rich quiet voice, "Honey, Mama was just funning;
she would never hurt you, you know that." She did not pause in her work
and she did not turn to look at him. He took his seat at the kitchen table,
thinking of the green man's invisible eyes.

At dinner under the kitchen fan, Jeffrey's father announced his
intention to go on a lecture tour. "Scott thinks it's the ideal way to
promote the new book," he said. Scott was their agent in New York.
Jeffrey's father wore a gray beard nothing like the green man's beard, and
he was so fat he had no waist, only a belt across the middle of his bulge,
like Humpty-Dumpty. He mopped his brow with his napkin every few
minutes.

"That's a marvelous idea," said Jeffrey's mother. Her yellow shift

THE GREEN MAN

clung to her in the heat, showing the outline of her big breasts and her
slender waist. She put a slice of cold roast beef on Jeffrey's plate, next to
his salad. "There you are, love," she said, smiling at him, as though
nothing whatever had happened.

"Thank you," Jeffrey said.

"Thank you whom?" growled his mother, doing her Captain Hook

face.

"Thank you. Mom."

"That's better. Give Mama a kiss," she said. She pursed her lips. He
screwed up his face and sacrificed it to her. She took his chin in her hand
and mashed her mouth against his. She smelled like tobacco, cows, and
wine. She released him with a satisfied smack of her lips. "Umm, gum,"
she said. Dropping his gaze to his plate, he noted with alarm the Italian
salad dressing running into his meat. "When would you be leaving?" his
mother said to his father.

"Around January first," said Jeffrey's father, forking roast beef.

"Can I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

"May I come with you," said his mother.

"May I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

His father scowled. "No, son. You've got school. This meat is a little
well done, Rae."

"I'm so sorry," Jeffrey's mother replied smoothly. She had been about
to transfer a slice of beef from the platter to her plate. Inspecting it, she
lifted it into the air and held it out to her husband instead. "Here, Simon.
This is as rare as can be."

Jeffrey's father proffered his plate. "What are you going to have?"

"Why, there's enough here to feed the Russian army," said Jeffrey's
mother. She took another piece of meat from the serving platter.

"For God's sake, Rae, that's an end piece. There's no red in it at all."

"It's perfectly delicious," said Jeffrey's mother with finality. She cut
a piece of dry brown meat, chewed it, then took a sip from her third glass
of white Gallo. Jeffrey watched his father watch her wrap her big fingers
around the glass, raise it, tilt it, suck up the pale liquid into her full,
sensual mouth.

Jeffrey's mother had been a radio actress in Hollywood in the Thirties,
known for her dramatic voice. She had met Jeffrey's father on the set of a

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

show where he was one of the head writers. Hanging in the upstairs
dressing room was a picture of her as she had looked then, a black-and-
white studio still. In the photograph, her hair was shoulder-length and
gently waved. Her chin rested on white-gloved hands. Around her neck
twined a choker of big round ceramic beads. She gazed straight out at the
photographer, fearless and subtly challenging. Jeffrey thought it was the
most beautiful picture he had ever seen.

They ate in silence for a while. Then his mother stood up and poured
herself another glass of wine from the counter. Jeffrey drank some milk.
His father said to him, "Don't fill your belly up with milk. You haven't
touched your salad." Jeffrey searched his salad for something without
much dressing on it. He settled on three cherry tomatoes. He ate them
slowly, one at a time, clamping down on them hard with his teeth so they
exploded into wet sweetness, like little bombs. Sitting again, his mother
took a few more bites of meat, then put her fork and knife in "finished"
position. She lit a Camel cigarette, blowing smoke up toward the ceiling.
"Is that all you're going to eat?" Jeffrey's father asked her.

She looked over her men. Her eyes twinkled. "I am so full I could not
pull a-no-ther blade of grass, baa, baa," she replied.

VERY DAY after that Jeffrey looked for the green man.
Sometimes he thought he saw him out of the comers of
his eyes, but when he turned, there was never anything
there. When his father took him shopping in New
Milford, the next big town over, Jeffrey scanned the clusters of hippies on
the Green. His father said, "If they'd bathe occasionally people would take
them more seriously." None of them looked like the green man. As trees
flashed by on their homeward drive, groves of slim trunks misted green,
Jeffrey searched their dappled depths for signs of dark thigh and hairy
shoulder, but they were just trees.

One evening, remembering the stories his mother had told him about
leaving food for the Little People, Jeffrey spirited a chicken leg and a cup
of milk out of the fridge and left them on the hood of the Buick. The next
morning, the chicken leg was gone and the cup was overturned in the
grass. Encouraged, he tried the experiment again, but abandoned it after
he stole out one night with a flashlight and surprised a raccoon mother and

THE GREEN MAN

her babies consuming the offerings. He stayed on the alert, and more than
once spent the day in the far pasture, hoping that the green man would
appear, but he did not.

One night Jeffrey's parents had a big fight. It was a Friday. They went
out to dinner and came home after Jeffrey was in bed. Jeffrey was glad when
they went out to dinner, though he could not have explained why,- it made
him feel safe, the way it made him feel safe on the rare occasions when he
walked into the kitchen and found them standing by the sink kissing.
Lying in bed, he thought about the green man while the old house creaked
around him in the dark. The house had been built in 1792. There was a
huge stone fireplace downstairs with a Dutch oven built into it, and there
was an attic full of cobwebs and old steamer trunks. The driveway gravel
had garnets in it; you could pick them up like rubies and hold them to the
light. The first spring after his parents had moved to the house, only white
flowers had come up in the front gardens. His mother had pulled them all
out because, she said, they reminded her of funerals. She had replaced
them with color: slashing red tulips, like her lipstick; foaming beds of
yellow, purple, blue, wine, rose, and brown irises; geysers of pink phlox
which she complained always ran to magenta after a few years.

When he was very little she had given him a little bed of his own to
plant, out near the well-house off the driveway. He had liked pansies, with
their foolish gold and black faces; bachelor's buttons, particularly the dark
reddish-purple kind; and four o'clocks, which opened only in the late
afternoon and always amazed him because they had flowers of different
colors on the same bush. His mother said to him, "You have a green
thumb." She always took care of the flowers but gave him the credit. When
he got older, he helped her weed among the corn and tomatoes. She told
him wonderful stories, about Wol the owl and Eeyore the donkey and a
green garter snake that had visited her one summer in the garden they had
had before they had moved to this place, when he was still in the baby
carriage. "He came right up and sat in my lap," she told him. "He would
go away when the sun went down and be back the next day." After a while
he got tired of gardening, and she eventually stopped asking him to help her.

He fell asleep and was awakened by the car crunching on the
driveway. Doors opened and slammed shut. He heard raised voices, his
mother's loud and contemptuous, his father's loud and defensive. A long

FANTASY &. SCIENCE FICTION

while passed before the voices stopped, then another long while during
which he heard his father's heavy ascension of the stairs, his bathroom
garglings and flushings, and finally silence. He lay in the dark, alert. His
chest and stomach felt heavy.

He thought, quite suddenly, of a day when he was four and his parents
had taken him down to the lake with some of their grown-up city friends.
There were water-lilies in the lake, which was very shallow, and perch,
and a dam at one end which the water slid over in slow glassy sheets every
spring thaw. That day the dam had been dry. The visitors had stood on the
concrete in their New York clothes, chatting and puffing on cigarettes,
admiring the scenery. Forgotten, Jeffrey had squatted at the edge of the
dam and looked out over the water. He had been able to see his reflection
in the surface of the lake, darkened and ripply,- then, as his eyes had
adjusted to the play of light and shadow on the water, he had found he
could look through his reflection and see the bottom of the lakebed.

Up on the dam the air was full of chattering voices and an odd tension.
Down in the water it was still and calm, lake-weed hanging immobile,
each pebble distinct. A yearning had swept over him, a yearning to be part
of that tranquility, to sink down deep into it; he had found himself falling
forward toward his reflection. His father had caught him and pulled him
back with an oath of concern. They had made much of his near-mishap,
which had pleased him. But now, lying in the dark, he remembered the
stillness at the bottom of the lake and longed for it again.

He had just begun to doze off for a second time when he heard his
bedroom door opening. Yellow hallway light jabbed his eyes. He smelled
his mother's cigarette and her Blue Grass cologne. He closed his eyes and
lay still, his heart pounding. The cigarette and cologne smells increased.
He felt her breathing above the bed. "Baby, " she said. She touched his hair.
He thought of the lake and sank down, down.

The next morning, his parents would only talk to one another in
monosyllables, and his father took the car into New Milford to have
breakfast there. Jeffrey sat at the big kitchen table with his mother. Her
cigarette burned in an ashtray. She looked tired, and drank several cups of
fragrant black coffee while he ate the buttered waffles she had made him.
"Are they good, baby?" she asked him. He nodded. After a silence, she

THE GREEN MAN

took a drag on her Camel and added, '"Your father's being a bastard. " When
he glanced up at her face, she blew smoke, blinked rapidly and smiled.
"Well, enough of that nonsense." She patted his small hand with her big
ugly one. "You're my precious baby. Finish your breakfast; Mama's got
chores to do."

She drained her coffee, got up from the table, and started sweeping the
floor. By the time he had eaten the last of his waffle and deposited his
dishes in the sink, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum
with a brush. He went upstairs to his room, got out the Science Officer
tunic his mother had made for him and the Spock ears his father had
bought for him, put them on, grabbed a phaser, and went downstairs again.
His mother was still scrubbing the kitchen floor. Her cigarette was in her
mouth. He left the house by the mountain laurel door and made for the
vegetable garden.

The garden was south of the far pasture where he had hidden in the
Buick and seen the green man for the first time. His mother had had one
of the young neighbor farmers till up the ground for her, and she had
planted tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, squash, beans, sweet peppers, cucum-
bers for pickles, dill for pickles (she made them herself in a big tub in a
nook off the kitchen next to the dishwasher), glads, which he thought
really looked glad with their bright colors, and sweet corn. He crawled
through the sweet corn, trying to circle around the party of Klingons who
had devastated the Federation outpost. The soft manured earth gave under
his knees and hands, rich as chocolate cake. Though the day was already
sweltering, the ground was still wet under the corn.

The Klingons were proving difficult to evade. They had spread out in
a wide scan of the area, searching for him. Jeffrey changed direction and
headed at top speed toward the old asparagus patch, which marked the
eastern edge of the tilled ground. Beyond it lay meadow, then a near arm
of the same woods which bordered the far pasture a quarter mile away.
Jeffrey reasoned that if he could make it to the meadow, he would be out
of the Klingons' phaser range, and the Enterprise could beam him up
before the Klingons knew what was happening. In the heat, his Spock ears
felt heavy. The asparagus, long gone to plume, waved before him. He broke
from the garden and made a dash for the cover of a clump of black
raspberry.

FANTASY SCIENCE FICTION

The green man was standing in the meadow halfway between the
forest edge and Jeffrey's raspberry clump. He looked exactly as Jeffrey
remembered him: naked as night, hairy, powerful. He raised his left arm,
muscle-bunched, in greeting, palm held flat and upright. For a moment
Jeffrey thought he was going to open the two middle fingers, the way Mr.
Spock did. Then the green man dropped his arm and began moving slowly
toward the woods. At the fringe, he stopped and looked over his hairy
shoulder at Jeffrey, waiting, smiling a white smile like the Pepsodent man,
though Jeffrey knew the green man probably did not brush regularly after
every meal. The smile hit Jeffrey like a baseball in the face, but in a good
way. It was a smile for him alone, like Mr. Halloran's smile at school when
he got an "E" on his spelling test. But before he could move or say
something, the green man had turned again and melted into the trees.

This time Jeffrey ran right up to the woods and a few steps in. "Come
back," he said. He took a few more steps. Sweet green sunlight dappled his
Science Officer tunic. It was cool in the shade. He looked carefully around
and could see no tracks the green man might have left. "Hello?" he said
again, raising his voice. Some birds thrashed and dropped and rose,
chittering. In the distance, tree-trunks leaned, half-fallen, in heavy slants.
There was moss on them. He took another few steps forward. No trap
snapped around his ankle, but the green man did not reappear.

At breakfast a week later, when his parents were eating at the same
table again but still not talking much, Jeffrey said to his father's newspa-
per, "I saw a man in the woods."

"Christ almighty!" his father exclaimed, lowering the paper. He had
dripped yellow egg yolk down his rotund plaid front. "I can't wear a clean
shirt for five minutes!"

"Oh, Simon; it's nothing." Jeffrey's mother put down her coffee cup,
stood up, went to the counter, picked up a washcloth, rinsed it under the
tap, walked back to the table, and began wiping off her husband. Impa-
tiently he took the cloth from her and wiped himself. She said, "Jeffrey
Andrew Russell, did you go into those woods by yourself?"

"No, Mama. I just went to the edge."

"Jeffrey?" She turned her all-knowing, undeceivable gaze upon him.
"Are you sure you're not fibbing to Mama?"

THE GREEN MAN

''That's all I did. Mama. I just saw him on the edge." He shut his
mouth. He had almost added, Of the far pasture.

His father put the washcloth aside. "Did he have a gun?"

"No." Jeffrey had been warned many times that hunters were always
creeping on to the property and shooting animals illegally, another reason
why he was forbidden to go into the woods alone, because hunters could
think you were a deer and shoot you before they knew you were a boy.

"What did he look like?"

"Simon," said Jeffrey's mother, "you don't have to grill him that
way."

"Will you please let me talk to the boy?"

"The boy?" Her tone was amused. Jeffrey shrank. "I believe your son
has a name.'" She lit a cigarette and blew smoke elaborately. Jeffrey's
father turned red.

"I am simply endeavoring to determine the facts of the matter, Rae,"
he snapped.

Jeffrey's mother shook her head and smiled to herself. To Jeffrey she
said, "What did the man look like, darling?"

"Like one of those hippies on the Green in New Milford," Jeffrey said.
"He didn't have any clothes on." His parents stiffened in unison and
exchanged meaningful looks.

His father said to his mother over his head, "Those damn kids. I'd
better call Harley Marsden." Harley Marsden was the town constable.

"Oh, Simon, they don't mean any harm."

Jeffrey's father pushed his chair back violently. Jeffrey shut his eyes.
He heard the swinging door from the kitchen to the foyer open and shut;
heavy steps; the telephone being dialed. His mother said to him, "I never
want you going near those woods again. Not without Mama. Do you
understand, Jeffrey?"

"Yes." He heard his father's grim voice talking into the receiver, but
he could not hear the words clearly.

"Yes, whom?"

"Yes, Mother." He opened his eyes again and gave her a reassuring
look. He was shocked to see tears on her cheeks. She looked away from
him, blinking, and took another drag on her cigarette. Guilt doused him
like cold rain water off a fir branch. "I'm sorry. Mama. I won't do it again. "

FANTASY SCIENCE FICTION

course you won't, darling/' she said. She gave him a brave smile
and patted his arm. "Mama loves you, that's all. She loves you more than
tongue can tell. She wouldn't want anything to happen to her precious
Jeffie."

"He didn't do anything," Jeffrey whispered. She shushed him and
stroked his arm, then his hair. His father shoved through the swinging
door.

"Harley said he'd bring Rob over to look around," said Mr. Russell.
"Those damn kids! I spend a fortune on 'No Trespassing' signs and I might
as well be putting out a welcome mat." To Jeffrey he said, "When did this
happen?"

"Last Saturday," Jeffrey said. His mother stood silently and turned to
the dishes in the kitchen sink.

"Did you hear any shots from the woods that afternoon?"

"No." Clink went the dishes.

"Did he do anything or say anything to you?"

"No." Suddenly, he was afraid, not for himself, but for the green man.

"Do you think you could show Mr. Marsden where you saw the
man?"

"Yes," he said. Later that day Harley and Rob, his beefy blond deputy,
arrived. Jeffrey led them and his father to the far pasture where Vi was.
Forbidden to accompany them, he watched the three tramp off into the
woods, like two bowling pins taking a bowling ball on a hike. They came
back in three hours, Jeffrey's father puffing and the two policemen shaking
their heads. They had found the dead remains of a campfire and something
else, something odd in a tree which they would not talk about in front of
Jeffrey.

His mother put him to bed early after a dinner of thick ham sand-
wiches and chocolate chip cookies, which she had spent all day making,
sheet after sheet of them, perfect and gleaming and fragrant. He lay
upstairs in his bedroom, trying to translate the adult drones from the
kitchen into language. He thought. He'll never come back now. I'll never
see him again. He felt a great desolation.

Nothing happened for many days. School came, a new grade with all
his old friends. He almost forgot the green man in his joy over the crackly
and perfumed new books and the wonderful stacks of empty lined writing

THE GREEN MAN

paper. He got E's in Spelling and Arithmetic and Reading, and he had a part
in the Thanksgiving pageant, a pilgrim with a big round white cardboard
collar. Hard frost killed all the flowers in the garden. Men came with a
truck to fill the oil-burning furnace in the cellar. One night he woke up
while it was still dark and saw snow drifting down like feathers through
the porch light.

He got out of bed, padded to his bedroom window, and looked out. He
had on his slip-slops, but his feet were still cold. At first he could only
think of Christmas: snow meant Christmas was coming. He loved Christ-
mas. He watched as the snow buried the back yard, the swing set, his
mother's dead roses, the dark eaves of the Little House where his father's
forbidden study was. He thought of the cow and the horse asleep in the
barn. The cow slept lying down, but the horse slept standing up. His
mother had told him that. He thought of snow falling over the silent
woods. He wondered if the green man was still out there, somewhere. He
must have gone back to his commune, he thought. But what if he didn't^
What if he didn't have a commune to go back to^

He felt a pang like the pang he felt when his mother looked sad and
lonely. He got back into bed and pulled the quilt up to his neck. He fell
asleep and dreamed he was wading through a river of hot dry green
cornstalks while his mother shouted to him from the kitchen door to
come back, come back, come back. The next morning was Saturday. He
rose early to smothered blank brightness. He got dressed and went
downstairs to the kitchen. His mother was at the counter with her red and
green Christmas apron on, Fanny Farmer Cookbook open, peering down
her bifocals with flour and sugar in sacks around her. He said to her, "May
I go out and play?"

"Don't I get a kiss first?" He went over to her and let her mash him
again. Her lips tasted like vanilla extract. She smiled at him, her world, her
joy, her own. "You put on your boots and your hood," she commanded
him. "And your snow-pants."

"Yes, Mama," he said.

"And your gloves."

"I will." He smiled back at her and went out of the kitchen and into
the hallway. In the hall he sat on the bottom of the stairs near the
telephone stand and pulled on his red snow-pants, then his red rubber

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

boots. They were hard to get on, but he did it. From the long coat-rack he
took down his stuffed coat with the hood. He put it on and buttoned it up.
He waddled back into the kitchen. His mother turned hurriedly from the
spice cupboard to the sink and opened the tap. He watched her wash out
a glass and put it on the drainboard. She turned smiling to him. ''You look
as snug as a bug in a rug," she said. "Are you going to make snow angels? "

"Yes," he said. After a moment he said, "Bye," and went outside into
the snow.

It was a completely different world at once. The morning sun was
bright and the morning sky was cloudless blue. The back yard stretched
away, a flat unbroken expanse of dazzling white. He walked away from the
house and onto the snow-covered lawn, leaving tracks with his red boots.
He climbed the slick ladder of the jungle gym, paused at the top to wave
at his mother, who was watching him through the kitchen door, then shot
down the slide on his rump. He landed in a heap of snow and laughed. The
metal of the slide gleamed clean behind him. He stood up, batted at his
snow-pants with his gloves; snow powdered the air and went up his nose.
He slid down the slide three more times, then wandered on through the
yard, taking his time lest she be watching still, past his father's Little
House, until he came to the lilac hedge with its hard brown sleeping buds.
He walked through the opening in the hedge and out of sight of the kitchen
door.

He began to run. It was awkward, in his leggings and boots; he slid a
little and fell down once. There was no snow under the pine trees at the
back of the Little House. He paused there on the needles to catch his
breath. His father was already hard at work, typing. Smoke trickled from
the Little House chimney. Jeffrey looked up at the brown-lit windows.
Inside, he knew, there were walls and walls of books, and silence like the
calm at the bottom of the lake. He hurried on.

He passed the cow barn and the horse stall and the ghostly rhubarb
patch. He passed the corral, which in spring and summer was calf-deep
manure. Even now, in places, the snow had melted into hoof-prints. On
the far side of the corral, a low fieldstone wall marked the edge of the far
pasture, but he did not head that way. He walked to the edge of what had
been the vegetable garden. Snow had softened its hard lumps and ridges.
Here and there grasses raised white plumes into the cold air, their

THE GREEN MAN

undersides pale brown. There were no more cornstalks; his mother had
them tilled under every fall. He stepped forward into the frozen furrows.

His head was buzzing, as though there were bees in his hair. This is
where the tomatoes were, he thought. This is where the potatoes were. He
had played one-potato, two-potato with his brother, who was in Vietnam.
He came to the edge of the garden and the asparagus trench. A few old stiff
spiny stalks still remained, dotted with dessicated red berries. His mother
had always said never to eat anything without asking her first; it might be
poisonous. He picked one of the asparagus berries and put it in his mouth.
It tasted bitter, so he spit it out.

He crossed the asparagus trench and entered the meadow. The white
trees of the woods lay waiting for him on the other side. The Klingons did
not fire upon him. He passed the snowy hump of a black faspberry bush,
and another. When he was close enough to see the green man's eyes, he
stopped.

They were dark and fierce and full of love. They made him want to
chase cows with a stick, to shout his name in church. The man was
holding out his furred hand. Jeffrey thought of his mother's smell of
tobacco and wine in the dark, of her mouth mashing his, of her precise
knife-cuts at the kitchen counter. He thought of his fat father asking,
"What are you going to have, Rae?" at the kitchen table, as though it was
food she needed. He thought of Vi rotting in silence while wasps knocked
themselves stupid against the windshield. He looked into the green man's
eyes and said, "Could you please show me where the raccoons go when
they go away and you don't see them?" The man nodded, very seriously.
Jeffrey reached up and took his hand, and together the two of them turned
and walked into the forest.

Films

KATHI MAIO

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
AS A MAMA’S BOY

Screenwriters

aren't as dumb as they
look. ..in most movie
reviews. I mean, if they
were as unimaginative and self-in-
dulgent as the critics of America
have proclaimed them, they would
do the natural write-what-you-
know thing and make a writer the
hero of their screenplays much more
often then they do. But they have
accepted the sad truth: The writer's
life is a less than fascinating spec-
tacle.

So, when a screenwriter shows
up in a movie at all, he is more
likely to be an embittered — if cru-
cial — cameo (e.g., The Player) than
the central character (as in the little
seen, but oddly endearing, The Big
Picture). Of all writers, journalists
{His Girl Friday, All the President's
Men) have certainly fared the best
on screen, because their role is seen

as an active one. They can be val-
iant investigators chasing down a
life-saving or President-toppling
exclusive.

Other types of authors rarely
get the star treatment. And when
they do, it's usually only as un-
avoidable remnants of the original
novel upon which a movie is based.
(Novelists can indulge their self-
referential tendencies much more
freely than scripters.) Even then,
the writer is little more than, as in
Sophie's Choice, the witness/scribe
of the high drama of other people's
lives.

Being a "serious" writer helps.
If you're a Hemingway, they might
even make a movie about your cal-
low youth. But if you're a master of
pop. cult., chances are you'll get no
respect — and even less screen time.
Outside of oddities like Misery
(wherein, let's face it, Kathy Bates's

FILMS

backwoods psycho was much more
compelling than James Caan's
writer hero), and the occasional
dangerous-to-know detective story
writer hero (a figure much more
common on television than on the
big screen), those who write for the
masses have been largely ignored.

But maybe that's changing.
Two — count them, two — movies
this past winter focused on Science
Fiction/Fantasy writers as protago-
nists. That's the good news. The
bad is that both were romantically
challenged, socially inept mama's
boys.

Sad-sack auteur Albert Brooks
made it to most major cineplexes
with his latest movie. Mother. In
it, he plays an L.A.-based science
fiction writer named John
Henderson. Never a best-seller as
an author, John has also been less
than successful as a lover and hus-
band. After his second marriage ends
in an acrimonious divorce (that
strips his suburban house of all fur-
niture but a single chair), he com-
plains to a friend that the one thing
all of his five major relationships
have had in common is that the
women in his life never believed in
him.

Not content to simply blame
his old girlfriends for his vicissi-
tudes, John contemplates the root

cause of all his problems. And who
better to blame for his miserable
life than the woman who gave birth
to him, mother Beatrice (Debbie
Reynolds)? Henderson decides that
if he is ever to achieve any happi-
ness, he must first come to terms
with dear old mom. So he packs a
few belongings into his convertible
and heads for the Bay Area to return
to the nest of his mildly alarmed
mother.

The writing here, by Brooks
and his long-time collaborator,
Monica Johnson, is often funny, but
generally sitcom-predictable. There
are gags about the old food in mom's
refrigerator and recurring bits about
her technophobia and her cheer>^
willingness to discuss her son's pri-
vate life with total strangers. There
is even an easily anticipated sub-
plot about John's sibling rivalry with
his younger brother, Jeff (Rob Mor-
row).

Beatrice Henderson offers more
affection to her second son, a suc-
cessful sports agent with a wife and
kids. At least that's the way Brooks's
hero perceives it — and there is
never any doubt that the viewpoint
of the film is his. For her firstborn,
she serves up (besides ancient sher-
bet and wilted iceberg) a steady dose
of disapproval and doubt. "This is
my son. ..the other one," she tells

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

acquaintances. And when John tells
her that he's working on a sequel to
what she refers to as "the space
thing," she questions the wisdom
of bringing back "those charac-
ters."

At times, Mother plays like a
rather tedious exercise in mother-
bashing. (And, at 49, isn't Brooks/
Henderson a little old to disrupt an
adult life completely to run home
to mommy and obsess on approval
issues with her?) What makes the
film enjoyable is that, although
Brooks and Johnson do dump on
her, they nonetheless take their
Mothera step beyond the castrating
shrew stereotype. Beatrice is a com-
plex woman with talents and
dreams her son was unaware of. She
has a life — and a sex life, to boot.
And although she knows how un-
just her son is being, she is mag-
nanimous (and, yes, loving) enough
to let him get away with it. When
Mother works — and it does much
of the time — it has as much to do
with casting as it does scripting,
however. For I don't believe Mother
would be half as successful without
the sly, smart performance of
Debbie Reynolds in the title role.
Albert Brooks deserves consider-
able credit for coaxing Debbie
Reynolds out of her Vegas retire-
ment from the movie biz. Those

who remember Reynolds as a perky
song-and-dance star (Singing in the
Rain, etc.) or an All-American
sweetheart {Tammy and the Bach-
elor, etc.) may find her nuanced
performance here a bit of a revela-
tion. And it's just that element of
surprise that makes movie-going
such a joy.

Watch Mother for the pleasure
of seeing Albert Brooks at his
kvetching, self-pitying best as a
writer-director-performer. Better
yet, see it for Debbie Reynolds's
triumphant return as a movie star
aftera twenty-five-year absence. But
don't see it for any insights into the
sf/fantasy writer's life. There aren't
any.

Although it's important to the
plot that John Henderson be a writer,
it is immaterial that he is in the sf
field. It merely allows for a few
jokes about book titles and strange
characters. And it provides an ex-
cuse for him to re-decorate his boy-
hood bedroom with interesting pop
artifacts like robot toys and posters
for Planet of the Apes and
Barbarella, Reason enough? Why
not. It's rather nice to see sf writers
getting a little on-screen attention,
no matter what the motivation.

But for those looking for a
movie that actually tries to say
something about a man's life as a

FILMS

writer, a much more interesting
movie is one that will be — natch —
a lot harder to find. And that is the
debut feature directed by Dan Ire-
land entitled The Whole Wide
World.

The film is adapted from a
memoir, One Who Walked Alone,
written by Novalyne Price Ellis.
The book recounts her friendship
(and abortive romance) with pulp-
master Robert E. Howard. Howard
is best known, of course, as the
creator of Conan the Barbarian. And
although he experimented in po-
etry, as well as a variety of pulp
formulas and series characters,
Howard will always be remembered
as the father of Conan, and, thereby,
one of the founders of the sub-genre
that would be called, variously, epic
fantasy, heroic fantasy, and sword
and sorcery.

Conan has lived on, since his
creator's death in 1 936, in a plethora
of bastardized product lines that
includes stories, novels, comic
books, feature films, and (soon) a
television series. The staying-power
of the massive Cimmerian is im-
pressive, to say the least. But it is
hardly surprising. Few characters
have so resonated with audiences
hungering for a vivid representa-
tion of unadulterated and untamed
masculinity. He takes what he

wants when he wants it, this icon
from the Hyborian age. Conan is a
noble brute who lives by his sword
and his own code (of sorts), but is
otherwise unfettered by social con-
trols.

What a powerful fantasy! And
for none more so than his creator.
For Robert Howard was a young
man mightily constrained by the
economics of the depression, the
disapproval of his small Texas town
(who thought he should go out and
get a real job and stop writing that
"filth" of his), and, most of all, by
family ties that bound him to his
sickly mother just as hard as a
Hyborian hero might be bound to a
wheel of torture.

It is the story of this tormented
soul that Mrs. Ellis hoped to tell
from her first-hand knowledge. She
succeeded. And although her book
achieved something considerably
less than best-seller status, it made
the leap to the big screen because
she had friends in the business.

As a teacher of speech for many
years, Novalyne Price Ellis inspired
many students. Among them an
actor/producer named Benjamin
Mouton and a writer named Michael
Scott Myers. When they read their
favorite high school teacher's book,
they vowed to bring it to the screen.
To this end, they approached Dan

FANTASY A. SCIENCE FICTION

Ireland, a producer and studio ex-
ecutive at Cineville for help. Ire-
land was so moved by Ellis's recol-
lections of Howard that he decided
to take a mighty leap and direct the
film himself.

The result is, as you could
guess, a labor of love by commited
filmmakers. And that kind of dedi-
cation is reason enough to hunt out
The Whole Wide World. But there
are plenty of other reasons to see
this film. Foremost among them is
that The Whole Wide World is a
very good movie, with breathtak-
ing cinematography of rural Texas
by Claudio Roca, and two phenom-
enal performances by Vincent
D'Onofrio as Howard, and Renee
Zellweger as Novalyne Price.

The story begins in 1934 when
a former beau introduces Novalyne
to a writer friend of his named Bob
Howard. Novalyne has trained to
be a teacher, but dreams of being a
writer, so she is intrigued by this
badly dressed and loudly loquacious
fellow. He's a real writer, who's
actually managed to sell and pub-
lish his stories widely.

Novalyne would love to pick
up a few tricks of the trade. So when
she takes a teaching job in How^ard's
home town, she wastes no time in
calling Howard ("the greatest pulp
writer in the whole world") to rees-

tablish their acquaintance. Unfor-
tunately, Bob's mother (Ann
Wedgeworth) does everything she
can to keep Novalyne away from
her son. But the willful Miss Price,
who is not one to be put off by an
interfering mother, barges ahead.
And soon, Bob and Novalyne are
taking long country drives to talk
about writing, society, and every-
thing else under the prairie moon.

For both, it is the kind of meet-
ing of the minds that is hard to
come by in small-town Texas. And
soon, it develops into something
more. But Howard, who can hold
forth at length about the decay of
civilization and the latest adven-
ture of Conan ("the damnedest bas-
tard that ever was"), holds back
when it comes to committing him-
self to Novalyne. He has already
devoted himself to another woman
— his mother.

After a single heady kiss, the
relationship quickly disintegrates
between Novalyne and Bob. He be-
comes more and more caught up in
the care of his ailing mother. She
gets more caught up in teaching
and continuing her own education.
And, practical and independent
woman that she is, she realizes that
she needs to move on if she hopes to
find a man capable of a healthy
relationship.

FILMS

The Whole Wide World is,
above all else, a love story about
lost chances and bad timing. It is
the great romance that should have
happened, but didn't. It's an old
story. But seldom has it been told so
heartbreakingly well. Vincent
D'Onofrio, one of our finest actors,
does a wonderful job of capturing
Howard's creative fury and sexual
longing, and, finally, his tortured
descent into despair. And Renee
Zellweger is amazing as the "spit-
fire" Novalyne.

D'Onofrio is so good and so
BIG in his performance, a lesser
actor would have been blown off
this screen by his bravado. Not Ms.
Zellweger. She holds her own, and
then some. (And it was this role
that helped win her her co-starring
role with Tom Cruise in the mega-
bit ferry Maguire.)

After reading Ellis's memoir,
and watching the fine film it be-
came, I couldn't help but wonder
whether a little mother-blaming
was also at work here. Was Mrs.
Howard (and the vaguely incestu-
ous possessiveness toward her son
depicted in the film) really the vil-
lain of the piece? Novalyne Price
clearly believed so. And, although
she may be a less than impartial
judge, certain facts cannot be dis-
puted.

After Novalyne had left for
graduate school in Louisiana, Mrs.
Howard's health failed completely.
When Bob Howard was informed
by a nurse that his mother was near
death, he went out to his car and
shot himself in the head. He died
within hours. And his mother died
the next day.

So, what are these two movies
telling us? That science fiction and
fantasy novelists are too hung up
on their mommies? We'll just have
to wait for Hollywood to provide us
with a little more evidence of their
attitudes towards fantasy writers.

Or maybe we already have it.
As I write this, Kevin [Mallrats]
Smith is about to release the last of
his New Jersey Trilogy films. And
in this one. Chasing Amy, all three
leads are comic book writer/artists.
(Fantasy authors of a different
stripe.)

Here, mothers play no direct
role. (What a relief !) But that isn't to
say that the characters don't have
significant relationship problems
and identity crises. For example,
the female lead, Alyssa (Joey Lauren
Adams), is a tad confused about her
sexual orientation and seems to be
unaware that the word "bi-sexual"
was coined just for folks like her-
self.

Therefore, despite an active

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

youth spent boffing both guys and
gals, she calls herself a lesbian and
is unaccountably shocked to find
herself in love with a male comics
scribe, Holden (Ben Affleck), who,
despite soulful eyes and the requi-
site facial hair of a slacker
heartthrob, turns out to be a consid-
erable jerk, not unlike his comics

partner, Banky (Jason Lee), who is a
belligerent creep from the start.

Whew! Give me John Hen-
derson and the star-crossed lovers
from Cross Plains, Texas, any day.
And while you're at it, summon
forth the spin-doctors. I think sf/
fantasy writers might have a little
image problem in tinseltown."^

OlStJeyS A?>CEMDAMCV CoOTtWOet) OfltHECKED.
Irt iOl5 VT l-A0(4CKeS ITS MOST AMBiTiOOS
THEME PA1?K ever.

A IX emflovees are

CERTAlM roles.

EKPECTEP To Follow

During the summer, your average ballfield attracts its share of insects (not to
mention a few pop flies). But as this story reminds us, the biggest pests don’t
usually go away just by swatting at them...

Michael Libling is new to the science fiction field, but he’s not new to the
writing world. A former student of Mordecai Richler, he has written speeches,
motivational sermons, commercials, ad campaigns, and a variety of other sorts of
nonfiction for more than a decade from his home in Montreal.

Mosquito League

By Michael Libling

WHAT STRUCK ME FIRST

about Benny Clay were the dead mos-
quitoes. The rest of us would sit in
the dugout slapping and scratching
while Benny would sit on the bench, hands on his knees, as relaxed as if
he were home watching Leave It to Beaver. We'd end up with bites,* Benny
would end up with dead mosquitoes hanging all over him. Limp legs. Limp
wings. Limp whatever. It was really something to see.

'T think it's my blood," he explained. "They start to bite me and that's
it; they die. Once it happened with a bee, too. Right here," he said, poking
himself in a stain of freckles. "I didn't even know I had a bee in me till Miss
Caprice told me to go wash my face." Miss Caprice had been his grade five
teacher in wherever he lived before he moved to Howell. He had men-
tioned the town a couple of times, but it wasn't interesting enough for me
to bother remembering. In fact, I didn't give much thought to any of the
towns Benny mentioned. He had lived in a lot of dull places, some even
duller than Howell.

FANTASY SCIENCE FICTION

Benny wanted to be a second baseman. Trouble was, he couldn't field
or hit worth a dam. Coach Ragemeyer said he was afraid of the ball. He
shut his eyes every time a grounder shot his way and bailed out at the
plate, even if the pitch was a mile outside. "You're worse than a girl. Clay!
Maybe we should start calling you Jenny?" And that's exactly what a lot
of the kids did. Strange thing was, it didn't seem to bother him any worse
than the mosquitoes did. I'd never met anyone quite like him.

"How come nothing seems to bug you, Benny? " I asked him one day,
a couple of innings after Coach Ragemeyer tore into him for letting
another grounder scoot between his legs.

"Stuff bothers me all right, but there's nothing I can do about it, so
I keep my feelings inside."

"Wish I could do that," I said. "I usually say something dumb — and
then get jumped on."

"I know," Benny said. "I couldn't believe it when you stood up to
Gilpin. He really belted you, didn't he?" Gilpin was a big jerk catcher for
the Briarwood Braves. He was about the only kid in the league who wore
spikes. He stressed the fact by leaving his mark every chance he got —
usually on somebody's face. I warned him that if he tried it with me. I'd
make him eat his glove. Well, he did, and I didn't.

I was small for my age, and, I guess, my brain must have matched. If
only my mouth had, too. Next to baseball, getting beaten up seemed to be
my favorite pastime.

I rolled up my right pant leg. "If you look real close, you can still see
where the bugger bit me after he spiked me. And under here," I raised my
shirt, "is where he clawed me. You'd think a kid that big wouldn't have
to fight dirty, but he does."

"Did he do that, too?" Benny asked, pointing to the yellow bruise on
my shoulder, just where my neck gets started.

"Nah! That's from the Skyler game and Evans."

"Figures. Evans has used his elbow on me a few times, too. Don't
understand why he has to play like that."

I spun around and showed Benny my back. "Here's where he kicked
me after he knocked me down."

"You ever win a fight, Brian?"

"Not yet. But I will," I said. "I'll get back at them some day. I hate
bullies. Hate their guts."

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MOSQUITO LEAGUE

"I hate them, too,'" Benny said. ''But Tm not going to mix it up and get
hurt even worse. If Evans wants to elbow me, I don't care, as long as he
doesn't do anything else. When guys like him and Gilpin start up with me,
I try to make myself invisible."

"Does it work?"

"Sometimes, I think."

"How can you tell?"

"When they don't hit me a second time."

"Maybe I should try that," I said.

"It wouldn't hurt." Benny laughed.

I joined him. "Yeah! It wouldn't hurt."

"Still, you're lucky, Brian."

"Lucky? Me?"

"At least, you can play ball. I stink. Coach says you could go right to
the top if you put your mind to it. Says you're the best shortstop he's seen
in years."

"Ragemeyer's an asshole. Only reason he coaches is so he can sell life
insurance to our parents. Anyhow, that's what Billy says." Billy was the
coach's son.

It was then we struck the deal. I'd teach Benny how to play ball and
he'd teach me how to be invisible.

First thing I taught him was to stop wearing shirts with red and white
stripes running across. "Fat kids shouldn't wear them, Benny. Makes you
look like that tub in the Bubble Bubble comics."

No wonder Benny wore Huskies. His father was a candy salesman,
supplying almost every confectionery up and down the coast. The first
time Benny showed me his cellar, I felt like Hansel and Gretel must have
when they stumbled into the witch's house. The floor was cluttered with
teetering cases of 12s, 24s, 36s and 48s, plastered with names like
Hershey's and Topps and Mars and Tootsie, while huge jars of goodies
strutted across the walls and tabletops. Jelly beans. Jujubes. Blackballs.
Wax lips. Honeymoons. Marshmallow bunnies. Licorice pipes. Candy
cigarettes.

Benny would check in with his parents a few times a day and I'd tag
along. It paid off. When his father was in town, he'd stuff our pockets with
jawbreakers, sunflower seeds, peanuts — you name it. All for free, too.

100

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

His mother would pour us fresh lemonade, pink for Benny, white for
me. It was something I never understood. At my house, if I was having
pink lemonade, my friends would get it, too. Usually, though, my mother
would just open a bottle of Hires.

Anyhow, most of the time, the kitchen visits went like this:

"Being Benny's friend pays dividends, doesn't it? " His mother would
smile, lips tight, as if she were holding in her front teeth.

I would nod. I wasn't sure what dividends were, but I sensed she knew
what she was talking about.

"But you must not be Benny's friend just for the treats, you know?
That would make you a false friend. The Bible says that false friends go
straight to Hell. And you would not want that to happen, would you? You
are going to watch out for Benny, aren't you?"

Watch out for him? fesus! He was twice my size. What did she expect
me to do? I would shake my head. It was plain to me that more than a few
of Benny's ex-friends were on their way to Hell at that very moment.

"Watch out for Benny," she would say, "and I promise he will watch
out for you. Now, would you like another nice glass of lemonade, Brian?"

"Could I please have the pink this time, like Benny, Mrs. Clay?"

"No, you cannot," she would say.

Once, I asked Benny why his mother would never let me have the pink
lemonade. "Some day, she might," he answered.

I preferred Benny's father. He didn't talk so much. And he didn't hold
back on any candies.

Although the fringe benefits of Benny's friendship were nice, the in-
betweens were no piece of cake — or, for that matter, handful of jujubes.
Teaching Benny was only slightly easier than, maybe, calling up a girl. Or
convincing Miss Cooke that Snapper really did pee on my homework.

Ragemeyer was right. Benny was afraid of the ball. Pain terrified him.

"Believe me, Benny, the fear of pain is worse than the pain itself." I'd
heard the line in a movie.

"That's what the guys who dish out the pain always say," Benny
replied.

"We'll start with a punch for a punch," I said.

"Huh?"

MOSQUITO LEAGUE

101

"ril punch you in the arm and then you'll punch me. We keep going
until one of us shouts 'uncle.'"

"Uncle/' Benny shouted.

"We haven't started yet/' I said. "You first. You hit me first."

Something brushed my arm.

"Was that it?" I asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Jesus, Benny, you got to punch harder than that. I barely felt it."

"I don't like to punch. It hurts my hand."

"Have it your way. But now it's my turn."

He shut his eyes and scrunched up his mouth till his lips twisted into
a pretzel. I gave him a quick jab on the shoulder. It was hard, but no way
near my best shot.

"Uncle!" Benny shouted. "Uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle,"
he yelped, hopping about like a toad on a heated trash can cover. (I know,
because we'd heated up a trash can cover and tossed a toad on just the
summer before. I never forgot what it looked like.)

As for Benny's part, he probably didn't find teaching me all that easy
either.

His philosophy was simple. "Sticks and stones will break my bones,
but keeping my mouth shut will never hurt me."

"I've never heard that version before," I said.

"It's the right version," he assured. "Keeping your mouth shut works
two ways. First, the bullies aren't likely to notice you. And second, if they
do start roughing you up, and you keep your mouth shut, they'll just get
bored and go away. Usually, before they do too much damage."

"So if I start getting punched out, I shouldn't say a word? Just let them
do it to me?"

"Uh-huh. They'll finish with you a lot quicker."

"Gee, I don't know if I could do that. If somebody's hitting me. I've got
to hit back."

"The trick is not to get hit in the first place. That's why keeping your
mouth shut right from the start is so important. It makes you invisible."

In the next game against Briarwood, Gilpin hit a double off the tip of
Benny's glove. It was the closest Benny had come to stopping a ball all

102

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

season. Nonetheless, I could hear Ragemeyer cursing, raging like a circus
geek on the top step of the dugout.

Rounding first, Gilpin spied Benny lumbering over to cover second.
'"Out of my way, lardboy,'' he taunted, driving his shoulder into Benny's
gut as he pulled up at the base.

Both benches roared hilarious approval. Both benches\ (I guess that
shouldn't have surprised me. Fostering team spirit had never been one of
Ragemeyer's strengths. ) "Laaaaaa-rrrrrrd boy," they laughed. "Laaaaaa-
rrrrrrd boy." Encouraged, Gilpin body-checked Benny out toward center
field. Benny tripped over his own heels and landed flat on his butt. He
didn't say a word. But he sure wasn't invisible. Not to me, anyhow.

Gilpin shrugged. Then turned to me at short.

"Well, if it isn't the wise ass — the short short! Seems to me I got some
unfinished business with you," he said, pounding right fist into left palm.

I began to swallow my lower lip and a good part of my chin.

"Better stay out of my way, you little shrimp, or I'm going to bury you
under third."

I stared at the ground, waiting for the invisibility to kick in. I knew
Benny was watching.

"What's the matter, loser, too chicken to face me man to man?"

My glove missed him by a good two yards. His first punch caught me
in the gut, so hard I think his fist bounced off the front of my backbone.
I don't remember where his second landed.

"And you were doing so well," said Benny.

Y THE FIRST WEEK of June, Benny no longer
closed his eyes when the ball came his way. By the third
week, he was able to stop most grounders, usually with
his body if not with his glove. Suddenly, Benny under-
stood that a bruise could be a badge of honor. By the end of the month, he
was handling almost everything except line drives and real high infield
pops. He didn't have much speed or range, couldn't turn the double play
for beans, but he was still playing an acceptable second base. Coach
Ragemeyer began to call him Benny, again. In fact, Jennies were few and
far between.

As for me, I'd managed to stay out of fights for over a month. We faced

MOSQUITO LEAGUE

103

the Braves and Gilpin two times in that period, and the Skyler Sox, with
Evans, three times, but I didn't let them bait me. I kept working on making
myself invisible, keeping my mouth shut. Of course, Coach Ragemeyer
benched me for a lot of those innings. "I hate to waste my best shortstop,
but you're too damn scrappy, Brian," he said. "I can't take a chance on one
of those boys maiming you. At least," he grinned, "until your folks take
a policy out on you."

When it came to July, however, Ragemeyer couldn't afford to leave
me out of the lineup. Two more games, and we needed them both to claim
a playoff spot. And wouldn't you know it, the two were against Briarwood
and Skyler — Gilpin and Evans.

Surprise. Surprise. Five days before the Briarwood game, Mrs. Clay
poured me a glass of pink lemonade.

I couldn't believe it.

"You have earned this," she said. "You have been a true friend to
Benny."

"Yeah, I have," I said, just to make sure she wouldn't forget the

fact.

"Drink up. There is a lot more where this came from," she promised.

It looked like pink lemonade. It smelled like pink lemonade. It tasted
like pink lemonade. But it didn't go down like pink lemonade. It washed
over my tongue, seemed to hesitate, then drifted past my tonsils, dallying,
taking its time, slow and easy, coating as it crept, not a bit eager to reach
my belly. It was cold, and quenching, and delicious (the best I'd ever
tasted), but, strangely, it left my insides warm and fuzzy — all of my
insides, from my belly up and from my belly down.

"It feels funny," I said.

Benny shrugged.

"Like it goes down extra slow or something," I said, tipping my glass
for the final drops, letting the ice cubes tap against my teeth.

"My mother sweetens it with something like honey."

"Oh?" I nodded.

Mrs. Clay refilled my glass.

I cannot say how many glasses of Mrs. Clay's pink lemonade I drank
that week, but it was a lot. I guess I was making up for lost time.

104

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

We had an early two run lead, but Briarwood tied it up in the third on
three hits, followed by an error by Benny. Gilpin led the ragging for the
Braves. Every insult any fat kid ever endured must have been fired Benny's
way in that inning alone. Still, he stood his ground, invisible like always.
I had to hand it to him. He might have been the biggest chicken I ever met,
but there was something brave about him, too.

Tm sure Ragemeyer would have taken Benny out then and there, but
the League rules wouldn't allow it. Every kid had to play a minimum
number of innings. Prior to game time, the Briarwood coach had informed
the league commissioner that the Clay boy — "'that load of blubber who
plays second"' — was way under the minimum. Benny would have to play
every remaining inning for Howell, including any playoff games, just to
break even. When he heard the ruling. Coach Ragemeyer bit the button off
his cap and almost choked to death. Billy whacked him on the back with
his first base glove and the button shot clear across the infield.

We got the go-ahead run in the fifth, but the Braves came right back
with two more in their half. Benny made another error that inning, but the
run had already scored. Even though the error didn't matter, the abuse flew
something terrible. Fathead. Lardass. Fatso. Pansy. Blimpo. Dickweed.
Dickhead. Fairy. Homo. Fat-ass. Ass-man. Blubber boy. Craphead. And,
yet again, fenny Jenny Jenny Jenny, Our bench and the other guys in the
field joined right in. "Shut up," I shouted. "He's doing his best." But
nobody heard me, except Benny.

What bothered me most was that Benny was actually playing a pretty
decent game. He had made quite a few nice stops and came close on a
couple of double plays. Even caught a pop-up, the kind he usually ran the
wrong way from. So when he hit the first double of his life in the top of the
ninth to put the tying run in scoringposition, I couldn't have been happier.
So what if it would've been a triple for most runners? This was pretty darn
special. Nobody was calling Benny names then. In fact, it was the first
time I'd ever heard Benny being cheered. It felt so good, I thought I was
going to cry. But I pushed that notion out of my head quickly enough.
Being Benny's friend had hurt my reputation enough. Crying would've
finished me for good.

There were two out when Billy Ragemeyer came to the plate. He

MOSQUITO LEAGUE

105

swung on the first pitch and lofted a leaky fly ball to medium right. That
should have been the game, but the Braves messed up. They must have
thought it was going to drop foul; no one made an effort to reel it in. It
landed a good foot fair. Everybody seemed to freeze from the shock, and
then Coach Ragemeyer started hollering, ''Run, Clay, run."

Benny was plodding round third by the time the right fielder got to the
ball. Even way over in the first base dugout we could hear his breathing.
It reminded me of a wounded wart hog I'd seen in one of those boring
nature movies from Disney — Wart Hog Wonders of Wallawallaland or
something.

He was halfway home before the ball was airborne. That's when
Gilpin snapped off his catcher's mask and whipped it like a flying saucer
right into Benny's face. But Benny rumbled on with barely a misstep. He
kept on coming, blood streaming out of what had been his nose.

"Attaboy, Clay!" Coach Ragemeyer cried.

"Go, Benny," I shouted.

Then Gilpin caught Benny with a spike on the shin and an elbow to
the throat, and my friend went down like a sack of mashed potatoes.
Gilpin straddled him, his face knotted up meaner than I'd ever seen it, as
the pitcher ran the ball the final few feet.

Coach Ragemeyer argued interference, but the umpire would hear
none of it. Not surprising, considering we were the visiting team and the
ump probably wanted to keep his job at the Briarwood tire plant, the outfit
that just happened to sponsor the Braves.

Gilpin held the ball in his hand till Benny came to, and with a big,
poison grin, he leaned down, put the ball to Benny's chin, and hissed,
"You're out. Fatso."

It was this moment that Benny chose not to be invisible. He exploded
into Gilpin, a sputtering, flailing mass of fists and phlegm. But nothing
seemed to land as hard as it should or in any place it could do much
damage. For a spell, it looked like Benny was trying to shove his nose into
Gilpin's mouth, but Gilpin would have none of it. A blow. A feint. A jab.
A twist. And Gilpin was behind him, Benny's head deflating in the crook
of Gilpin's arm. "I want to hear you cry 'uncle,' Fatso, Or Tm going to twist
your fat little skull right off your fat little neck."

I must have leaped out of the dugout, over the field and onto Gilpin's

106

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

back in a single stride. I wrapped my arms around his neck and wrenched
with every bit of my weight. Benny hit the ground and rolled to safety, and
there I was, riding Gilpin up onto the pitcher's mound like a broncobuster
going for broke. No matter which way he turned, I turned with him. He
tried wracking me off against the backstop. He tried flipping me over his
head. He tried shaking me loose by rolling across the on-deck circle. He
tried prying my fingers apart one by one. But nothing worked. Nothing
was going to work. And then, at home plate, he sank his teeth into my
arm.

A fleshy, bloody and hungry bite.

A bite that dug for bone.

All right, I admit my eyes got teary; I couldn't help it. It hurt so bad.
Finally, I had nothing left. I slid down his back, feet first, onto the plate,
and waited for the worst that was sure to come.

It was one of those moments you read about, the kind that seem to last
forever.

I wobbled on my heels, staring up at him, my arm in his mouth, my
blood dripping from his mouth. And he stood, staring at me, swaying just
a little, his teeth in my arm, his lips and chin oozing with my blood. I
wanted to back away, but couldn't. He didn't look like he was planning
on moving anywhere. The only sound was his nostrils, humming hoarsely,
sputtering feebly, until there was no sound at all.

I realized then that Gilpin was hanging from my outstretched arm.

Limp legs.

Limp arms.

Limp mouth.

I shuddered, shook, shook again. My arm fell free, and the Briarwood
Braves' catcher crumpled onto home plate.

I vaguely remember somebody saying, "I think he's dead." And Coach
Ragemeyer helping me to the bench with: "You're going to need stitches,
and probably some shots or something. It's a shame your parents didn't
listen and buy the accident coverage I told them to."

Benny sent a basket to the hospital for me. It was packed with all sorts
of good stuff: a Three Musketeers, a Fifth Avenue, six licorice pipes, a

MOSQUITO LEAGUE

107

couple of strawberry whips, a wad of suckers, some loose jellybeans, and,
poking up through the center, a big, red thermos of pink lemonade.

Dear Brian,

My mother always says that sooner or later bullies bite off more than
they can chew.

Thanks for being the best friend I ever had.

Your friend always,

Benny Clay

P. S. Don 't drink it all at once. It keeps almost forever and a little goes a
long way.

I never did see Benny again. The story was that his father had been
transferred to another town with a name I can't recall.

The police got involved and some medical guy came down from the
state capital. My parents were pretty worried. I heard from more than a few
people that I might have to go to reform school or something, even though
I hadn't done anything. But all that ended when word came out that Gilpin
had had a heart attack. It was quite a relief, and I bought the line along with
everyone else. In fact, I believed it until the following spring when I began
to notice the mosquitoes on my arm. Dead. Just hanging there.

Of course, it upset me for a bit. Then I pulled the thermos closer and
checked the schedule to see when the Skyler team and Evans were coming
to town.

Michael Martin finds that he cannot get away from comics. His fiction-writing
career began while he was serving as Marvel Comics' West Coast Field Rep, and
the issue of Marvel's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comic book series that he
coauthored is due out in a couple of months. As you'll see in the following story,
however, Mr. Martin has a decidedly different take on comic book superheroes.
It's not all fun and games, you know.

Giants in the Earth

Michael A. Martin

APTAIN PARADOX'S CALLS

always came at the most inopportune
times, Fiona and I had just collapsed, en-
twined together on her cool sheets, after a

show, a quick Moroccan dinner, yet another argument about my lifestyle,
and finally a furious bout of lovemaking. Sleep was settling over my eyes
like a heavy gauze when the beeper Td left on the dresser made its
distinctive ''ping!'" sound,

"'Don't answer, Craig," she groaned, grabbing my arm.

I carefully disentangled myself from the sheet, and from Fiona. "I'm
afraid I have to." I began to put on my trousers, started searching for my
shoes.

"A story?"

I nodded, trying not to look guilty. I hated lying to her.

"Could be a Pulitzer," I said, as always. I donned my shirt and shoes
and kissed her on the forehead. She was still pouting, as always, when the
apartment door closed behind me. Another perfectly wonderful Sunday,
ruined.

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

109

The morning sun was just beginning to paint the sky yellow and blue.
I ducked into'an alley half a block from Fiona's apartment. No one was
there.

"Is it bad, Paradox? " I said into the beeper after thumbing the transmit
button.

"It's bad all right," came Paradox's deep resonant voice, preternatu-
rally clear even through the tiny speaker. He always sounded like he was
doing an impression of Sergeant Preston of the Mounties. But Captain
Paradox was the genuine article. He really, actually, genuinely sounded
like that.

It scared me sometimes.

"How bad? " I asked, as if I didn't know what he was going to say next.

"I have finally finished my work on the Probability Key," he said, his
voice a dignified, rolling ocean. "At long last we can begin to make
tht... adjustments we've discussed."

That sounded too much like good news. "What's the bad news, sir?"

The Captain's voice took on the somber tones of the sepulcher.
"Thibodeaux is back, " he said. "He wants the Key, lad, and very badly. His
appearance will either bring our plan to a swift denouement, or else it will
destroy it utterly. Get here as quickly as you can. Quantum Boy."

Dramatic, as always. But it didn't sound good. I flicked another button
on the beeper, releasing a minute trace of the quantum foam from its
magnetic bottle. Frost-bitten millipedes ran up and down my spine as
probabilities rearranged themselves. My jacket and slacks liquefied and
flowed around me, then solidified into a familiar skin-tight lemon-lime
costume.

"On my way, " I said and stuffed the beeper into a belt-pouch. My cape
billowed with a flourish as I vaulted into the brightening sky, meditating
on how much I had come to hate the name "Quantum Boy."

Captain Paradox kept his lab and secret headquarters discreetly
hidden behind the facade of a third-floor apartment on Portland's fashion-
able Northwest 23rd Avenue. The Captain's discretion, outright secrecy
really, isn't all that unusual for a Super. It's been de rigueur for the Super
lifestyle since the Great Lawrence Whoops created most of us back in the
early 1970's.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

In those early days, Supers had been considered freaks, heresies, even
blasphemies. Now, only a couple of short years remain on the Millennial
clock. To some, the Supers represent salvation. Others see us as the
Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The Willamette River sparkled serenely beneath me, and for a mo-
ment I recaptured the heady adolescent thrill of flight for its own sake. I
stretched my body taut in the wind, limbs outstretched like a child
imitating an airplane. I watched the river, as yet undisturbed by boats, as
it dropped away behind me.

The early-morning traffic had already begun its westward bustle
across the Morrison and Burnside Bridges. Homs honked and arms
gestured from a dozen vehicles beneath me.

Fans or detractors^

My flight path curved downward over the avenues of the Northwest
quadrant of Portland. I grazed the rooftops and could see a few early risers
unlocking their offices and storefronts, getting ready for the day. A
heavyset woman in a flower-print dress looked up and saw me, an "O'' of
surprise instantly forming on her lips. A block away, a paperboy on a
mountain bike flung a newspaper and gestured a one-handed "thumbs-
up" to me. Across the street, a dour-faced man in a business suit flipped
me the hairy bird.

I decided to ignore my adoring public and concentrate on the improb-
able act of flying. I knew as well as anybody that Supers have threatened
public safety as often as they'd preserved it, so it never surprised me that
certain folks had no use for us, whatever our ideology.

Their resentment is understandable. These days, it seems all I ever
read about in the papers are stories of meta-human thieves, terrorists, and
world-beaters and all the havoc they wreak. Sometimes they're captured,
or killed, or driven off by the more altruistic Supers. Other times, there
simply aren't enough benevolent Supers around to land the crippled jet, or
to defuse the terrorist's bomb, or to keep the downtown skyscraper from
being anti-gravved from its foundations into Low Earth Orbit. On occa-
sions such as these, a whole lot of civilians are toast. Their resentment is
understandable.

I could see from the air that half of Captain Paradox's roof was
missing, flensed from the four walls as though by some impossibly sharp

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

111

carving knife. I could see into the lab, which resembled a three-dimen-
sional cutaway diagram, strewn with upended computer equipment. My
pulse raced. What the hell could have done this?

I touched down, landing in a careful crouch on the roof of the
Captain's lab.

I pulled the beeper out, whispered into it. "Captain Paradox?" I tried
again. Nothing. I closed my eyes behind the little domino mask and saw
Fiona, still pouting. Craig Cavanaugh, Quantum-fucking-Boy. Why the
hell was I still doing this shit at thirty? Taking a deep breath, I very
deliberately jumped through the gap in the roof, my cape trailing behind
me like an emerald contrail.

The lab had evidently been ransacked in a hurry during the ten
minutes it had taken me to fly from Southeast Portland across the
Willamette and north along the shore into the Northwest quadrant.
Computers and monitors and glass piping and aluminum conduits were
scattered and shattered, as though they had been not only thrown about
by something strong and malevolent, but had also exploded from within.
But there was no sign of anyone else in the room.

I wondered which of Captain Paradox's many foes could have been
responsible. There was no shortage of hostile Supers whom Paradox had,
over the years, given cause for revenge. The colossal destruction was
consistent with some of the physically powerful Supers, like Red Ram-
page or Pallet Jack. I tried to cross at least a few of Paradox's enemies off
the list: If Top Quark had been the attacker, for instance, it was likely that
nothing would remain of the whole block but a crater lined with radioac-
tive glass. T.E.N.D.R.I.L. agents were usually more subtle than this, but
who knew?

I wondered if a clever scientific-Super, somebody like Vitriol or
Wishcraft, might camouflage his search of the place with gratuitous
destruction, simply to throw me and Paradox off his scent.

Then I noticed Captain Paradox's costume lying amid the rubble. The
cowl, the red tights, and the yellow gloves and boots were all attached, as
though he had been standing in the lab in full costume when...

I carefully picked the costume off the floor, and reached into its still-
attached utility belt. A few white crystals, like sugar cubes, pattered from

112

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

the limp scarlet cowl to the floor. I dropped the costume then, in
revulsion.

''Welcome to your death," rasped a sandpaper voice from behind me.
I hadn't seen him standing there, but it stood to reason that I couldn't be
all alone in Captain Paradox's lab. Not after what had evidently happened
here so very recently. That would have been. ..improbable, to say the
least.

"Professor Thaddeus Thibodeaux," I said, feigning calm. I turned very
deliberately toward him, watching him carefully. I wanted to be ready for
anything, any quick motion, any sudden grab for a weapon.

He smiled, reptile-like. I thought of the Grinch as he made a deep,
mock-courteous bow. He was thin, old, cadaverous. Thibodeaux could
only be described as classically, melodramatically Evil.

I tried to sound threatening. "What the hell have you done with
Captain Paradox? If you've hurt him, I swear..."

Thaddeus Thibodeaux tsk-tsked at me, still grinning that nasty grin.
"My boy," said Thibodeaux in that oh-so-carefully cultivated mid- Atlan-
tic accent. "The man to whom you refer is, or rather was — how shall I say
it — always an unlikely sort. Now, it appears he has at last been rendered
impossible."

That rattled me, and gave Thibodeaux a brief advantage, which he
pressed. He produced a small pistol from inside his tidy white lab coat. He
leveled it at my mid-section. I tensed, but didn't move. Nearly twenty feet
separated us. Could I close the distance before he nailed me?

I had to keep him talking. Buy some time. "Why, Thibodeaux? You've
always had more class than this. First you wreck Captain Paradox's lab.
Then, you threaten me with a pistol. It's not your style."

Thibodeaux marginally lowered the gun. I heaved an inner sigh of
relief that I hoped he wouldn't notice. I knew that villains can never
refrain from talking about themselves, or resist describing the minutiae
of their plans for world domination.

Thibodeaux chuckled almost benevolently. "There are a great many,
myself included," he said, "who would happily kill both you and Captain
Paradox to obtain his most puissant weapon: the Probability Key."

Shit!

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

113

"You're thirty, Craig/' Fiona had said over a mouthful of grape leaf-
wrapped dolma. "It's silly for you to still be running all over the country
to write stories about this superannuated Saturday matinee hero and his
teen sidekick."

I tried to pat her hand, but she pulled it away. "It's important work,"
I said lamely, ending in a shrug while she chewed very slowly and
glowered at me.

Important work? Maybe. Improbable work? Certainly. It was improb-
able that news editors continued to pay such good money for stories about
the Supers years after they had become commonplace. I sometimes
wondered if that's as improbable as having a fiancee who doesn't recog-
nize you just because you happen to be wearing tights and a domino mask.

"It's not real life, Craig, " she said. Her eyes were getting very blue and
moist. "Real life is settling down, getting married. Kids, maybe. A career
with some predictability. Something that doesn't involve hanging upside-
down from helicopter runners, or nearly getting sacrificed to some
volcano god for the sake of a few exclusive photos."

I didn't have an answer for her. And I couldn't tell her the real truth.
Captain Paradox needed me. The universe needed me.

QETTING shot might have been a less painful
option than the one I chose. But instead of absorbing the
bullet, I concentrated with every erg of power at my
disposal on Thibodeaux's gun-hand. With a cry, the
stick-thin old man dropped the gun to the wreckage-strewn lab floor. He
clutched his useless right hand, which now resembled a sea lion's flipper,
in his other hand.

Altering probabilities to the extent of actually changing the shape of
an adversary's body had always put a huge strain on me. Besides being
contrary to the Captain's overly solicitous sense of heroic ethics. Still, it
wasn't something I'd do lightly, at least under normal circumstances.
Captain Paradox had always cast a long, moderating shadow across my
more volcanic impulses.

But now I stood face to face with the man who in all likelihood had
just killed Captain Paradox. I walked over to Thibodeaux, trying not to
weave as I moved. I summoned all my remaining strength and grasped

114

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

the old man by his collar, dragging him to his feet.

"I ought to finish you right now for what you've done to Captain
Paradox/' I hissed. How many times had Captain Paradox sagaciously
talked me down from this precipice?

Thaddeus Thibodeaux only laughed, but with an incongruously
beneficent tone. He dropped his left hand into his coat pocket. I grabbed
his wrist, felt the bones creak and grind like dry kindling. Something was
in his pocket, a weapon perhaps, and I wanted to see it. I released his wrist
and pulled the object from the depths of his jacket, letting Thibodeaux
crumple to the lab floor.

It was a foot-long, notched metal rod, and it gleamed an unnaturally
bright silver. It should have weighed ten pounds or more, but it had
virtually no heft at all. I remembered some of Captain Paradox's pedantic
descriptions of the thing's inner workings: super-light wafers, separated
by a mere hydrogen atom's width. Quantum effects. My eyes widened
behind the opaque white eye-slits of the domino mask. An errant wind
from outside the ruined ceiling made my cape rustle and whisper around
my knees.

I'd never held the thing in my hands before, or even seen it up close.
But I knew it had to be Captain Paradox's Probability Key.

Thibodeaux sneered up at me from the floor. But his face didn't bear
quite the same hatred I remembered from our every other encounter. From
the time I'd first seen Thibodeaux's wrinkled death's head expression, it
had imprinted itself on me as the very definition of evil.

I'd been a little kid back then. Was it pity I saw now in his eyes, rather
than malice?

"You jock-strapped idiots," he said, shaking his head. "Fools wearing
your underwear outside your pants. Do you think this is the way the world
is really supposed to be? Endless, inconclusive fights between costumed
heroes and costumed villains?

"Before the Great Whoops, the world made sense. A prosaic, dull sort
of sense, but the universe at least had a kind of dignity. Little triumphs
counted for something. Gods in spandex couldn't move planets from their
orbits on a whim."

I swallowed, but my throat felt like a gravel road. I remembered when
the world made sense, too. And I remembered being a kid. A misfit teen

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

115

who saw in the newly changed post-Whoops world a way out. A kid for
whom saving the world with Captain Paradox became both a divine
calling and a source of entertainment that not even the very best comic
books and video games could provide.

''You were there beside Paradox when the Whoops happened, weren't
you?" Thibodeaux said. "He was your uncle, and your late mother had
placed you in his care."

I blanched. How did he know this? When had he had time to raid the
Captain's private files? Before Captain Paradox had become Captain
Paradox, back when he was simply Dr. Harold Harwood, he had led a
research project at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in Northern California.
Uncle Harry had been studying the quantum foam that underlies the
universe itself. He'd described the quantum foam as "the mattress-pad
upon which the fitted sheets and blankets of reality are stretched."
Whatever, I had thought at the time. All I remembered of the project was
a lot of uninteresting math and a really cool-looking particle-accelerator
ring at the lab.

And, of course, I remembered being in that lab on the day an O-ring
blew and a batch of quantum foam accidentally got into the ground water,
forever altering the laws of probability and the fundamental physics of the
universe. The Supers were bom that day. The good ones and the bad ones
both.

"Your uncle Harry wasn't a very responsible guardian," continued
Thibodeaux. "The so-called 'Great Whoops' was no accident. Dr. Harwood
knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was rewriting the rules of the
universe to make it more to his liking. He wanted a world where
everything made sense in terms of black and white. Heroes and villains.
What could be more simple?

"But he couldn't get it quite right on that first attempt. The comic-
book world he'd dreamed of was too complex. Too many variables. Too
many loose cannons to lash down, too many Supers who refused to behave
themselves. He needed to make another, more careful attempt at omnipo-
tence."

I turned the silver key over and over in my hands. It seemed to twist
in my grasp, as though it contained restless energies that wouldn't sit still
for long.

116

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

'"Look well at the Key, Quantum Boy," Thibodeaux said, a sneer
creeping into his voice as he uttered the name. Or was that just me? "And
think about it. You hold the key to all Probability now. You, not Captain
Paradox. You can live in Paradox's fantasy, or you can recast the universe
into something saner. The decision is yours."

Decisions. I knew I didn't want to face any momentous decisions. At
least not without asking the Captain for some guidance. If only he hadn't
been reduced to a handful of sugar-cubes, I maundered. I felt like a
weakling for thinking that, and hated myself for it.

Then a deep, familiar voice boomed from behind me.

"Good work. Quantum Boy. I see you've recovered the Probability
Key. And that Thibodeaux has yet to corrupt its energies. Get ready.
Quantum Boy."

Captain Paradox stood whole, inexplicably restored. He was a few
meters from where he had apparently fallen, and now showed no signs of
the odd crystallization effect. Paradox's red and yellow uniform was
immaculate, scarcely wrinkling even at the bending places. His eyes
twinkled beneath his ocher-colored cowl and his cape tossed and swirled,
even though there was very little wind coming down from the hole in the
ceiling. It was as though all reality had shifted itself, just for me.

Oh, I thought, pondering Thibodeaux's useless right arm and the
nearly weightless, pulsating metal I held in my hand.

"Nuts!" hissed Thaddeus Thibodeaux. His trademark.

I ignored him, and noticed that my jaw was hanging slackly. Nothing
connected with my adventures with Captain Paradox ought to surprise
me, I thought.

"'Get Ready'?" I asked.

"Prepare to focus your probability-altering abilities through the Key.
This will realign all Probability, as we've discussed. It looks like your powers
have already triggered the Key's energies. Can you feel it powering up?"

I could, and nodded.

"Once the Key is completely activated," said Captain Paradox, "we'll
only have one chance at this, you know."

I nodded mutely. I was Quantum Boy, after all. He was Captain
Paradox. The legend, the square-jawed hero who always spoke in those
quaint "as I'm sure you're already aware, professor" cliches.

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

117

"Sure, Captain Paradox," I said, grasping the slender metal stick in
hands that felt slick and clammy inside the lime-colored gloves. My eyes
screwed themselves tightly shut behind the domino mask. I tried to
concentrate on the Probability Key, on what I knew it could do. On
Captain Paradox's careful lessons.

I opened my eyes to see Captain Paradox standing over Thibodeaux.
The white lab coat hung on the wretched little man like a becalmed
sail.

"There are too many Supers who take no responsibility for their
abilities," said Paradox, He was using his now world-famous Lecturing
Voice. "Too many who, like you, would run roughshod over the helpless
billions. The Great Origin has given the world a few very powerful men
and women who seek only justice. But it has also unleashed incalculable
evil and destruction."

The Captain had never permitted me to use the term "Great Whoops"
in his presence. Supers are a gift from Fate, not an accident to be regretted,
he had told me on several occasions.

The metal rod began to vibrate in my hand. It grew warm. I continued
to concentrate, with difficulty.

The Captain continued to lecture. He couldn't help himself.

"Now, we can undo the evils wrought by misguided meta-humans,"
Captain Paradox said. "The Probability Key can adjust the Great Origin
very slightly. It can turn the tide. It can increase the heroes-to-villains
ratio."

Thibodeaux smiled grimly up at the hero towering over him, "Why
stop there?" he asked, chuckling. "Why not simply redirect the quantum
foam to write us over completely? Why not fill the world entirely with
spandex-clad do-gooders?"

Captain Paradox began stroking his smooth bridge-abutment of a
chin as though actually considering this. Absurdly, I wondered how the
woman in the flower-print dress, or the man who'd given me the finger
this morning, would look in primary-colored spandex, flying across the
Portland skyline.

The rod tried to wrench itself out of my grip. I continued to concen-
trate on holding on to it, but more unbidden, distracting images appeared
before me.

118

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

I imagined myself sixty years old. Captain Paradox still calls me
Quantum Boy.

I saw Fiona, her pretty features sullied by a frown. She scolding me for
being an irresponsible Peter Pan. Me deserving it. Where was she going to
fit in inside the juvenile paradise Paradox must be envisioning at this
moment?

Where was / going to fit in?

I could barely hold onto the Probability Key anymore. I grasped at it
with two hands, both of which were becoming numb with the strain. I
concentrated on holding on. The sound of thunder surrounded me,
centering on the slender cylinder in my hands.

Captain Paradox's voice sliced through the other distractions. "The
power's got to be released, boy! We've only one shot at this! You know
what to do! Make a wish, boy! Make a wish!"

"Be careful what you wish for, " I thought I heard Thibodeaux rasp. But
I couldn't be sure.

I closed my eyes, wished hard, and let go of the rod. I heard a
thunderclap and then a

tinkling sound as though something fragile had been smashed with
great force into a linoleum floor.

Something had. The pink earthenware coffee cup had launched like
a projectile from my soap-slicked hands right onto the kitchen floor.

"Goddammit," I said. That had been my favorite coffee cup. I concen-
trated on the moist shards on the floor for a long moment, willing them
to reassemble.

Nothing. I smiled. I tossed the shards into the trash and rinsed off two
other coffee mugs and Fiona's fancy doo-hickey that made such wonder-
fully neat, even slices of cheese. The toast popped and the kettle began to
whistle. Quiet feet padded into the kitchen, approaching me from behind.
Gentle hands encircled my waist.

"Craig!" Fiona said. "You're making me breakfast?"

I smiled over my shoulder at her. "You sound surprised."

"You never make me breakfast. Besides, you said you had to answer
a call. A big story. Maybe a Pulitzer." She made a face when she said
"Pulitzer," one of my wearisome, oft-repeated bullshit-words.

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

119

"I decided not to take the call/' I said. "I think I'm going to go look
for a job, instead. Or maybe a few nice, safe freelance writing projects I can
tackle at home."

Fiona's eyes were bigger than the saucers I set on the kitchen table.
She didn't speak as I opened the drapes over the kitchen sink and opened
the window, letting the morning in. The gauzy curtains billowed gently
in the breeze, like Captain Paradox's cape.

Ping!

I noticed then that my beeper was on the kitchen table. Had I wished
it there? I picked it up and excused myself to the bathroom while Fiona
poured the coffee.

"Quantum Boy!" crackled Captain Paradox's voice, echoing very
faintly. "Thibodeaux must have used the Probability Key against us
somehow. Everything is dark. I don't know where I am..."

I wasn't enjoying this. Captain Paradox should sound strong. Confi-
dent. This was the voice of a lost waif. I realized then that to Captain
Paradox, super-heroing had become everything. It had been his entire
world. In a world without Supers, how would he survive?

"Um, I think something's gone wrong with the Key, " I said. I probably
didn't sound very convincing.

"It's Thibodeaux," Captain Paradox said, almost too faintly to hear.
"Find him, Quantum Boy. Find him!"

I grimaced, and flicked the beeper off. Quantum Boy. Shit.

ril find him all right.

I returned to the kitchen table and sat down beside Fiona. She smiled
at me over the top of her coffee cup.

"Let's get married," she said.

I raised an eyebrow, then said, "Okay." My lips started to curl into
what felt like a smile.

I sipped my coffee and munched a piece of toast while flipping through
the telephone directory I'd propped on my knee. I scanned the "Th"
section in the white pages.

"If we're going to get married, we ought to think about the finances,"
I said.

"Who are you looking up?"

Ah, there it is. Thibodeaux, Thaddeus.

120

FANTASY 8l SCIENCE FICTION

"'Just an old colleague/' I said. "I'll bet money he's looking for a new
line of work right about now, too."

Portrait of a Paradox: The Life and Times of Dr. Harold Harwood. I
already had the title down. I figured I could use plenty of primary sources,
like Thibodeaux. Maybe even a co-biographer. Yeah, a biography. Supers
would be like dinosaurs: People would enjoy reading about them a lot
more than they would being threatened by them. I had a feeling that once
everybody understood that the Supers were safely dead, confined now to
the four-color pages where they belonged, the book could sell millions.

I reached for the telephone.*^

'How's the new insomnia pill goingl

Science

Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty
THE SCIENCE OF INVISIBILITY

Our science column returns
with two new columnists, who will
periodically be complementing Dr.
Benford (who*s due back next
month). Most of you know Pat
Murphy from her award-winning
fiction; what you may not know is
that Pat has worked for years at the
Exploratorium, a wonderful hands-
on science museum in San Fran-
cisco. Paul Doherty is a physicist
with a Ph.D. from MIT who also
works at the Exploratorium, in ad-
dition to teaching and writing many
science activity books. Together
they'll be bringing us a new look at
the sciences (including this month 's
view of things not seen). — Ed.

ONE HUNDRED

years ago (1897), H. G.
Wells created the
first stealth human
being: the invisible man. Wells com-
bined science and fiction to craft a
novel exploring the possibilities and

drawbacks of becoming an invis-
ible person. At about the same time,
J. J. Thompson discovered the elec-
tron. That discovery led to our
modern theory of the interactions
of light and matter, quantum elec-
trodynamics, which allows us to
understand what would be actually
needed to achieve invisibility.

Invisibility is such a handy de-
vice — in both science fiction and
fantasy. Its use has ranged from
Wells's scientific treatment to the
ever-so-useful magic ring or cloak
of invisibility. On this anniversary,
we thought we'd take a look at the
science of invisibility, including (in
true Exploratorium fashion) a few
experiments you can try at home.

In The Invisible Man, Wells
provides a basic explanation of the
science. (He got it right, too — which
isn't surprising since Wells studied
science and later became a science
teacher.) The invisible man of Wells's
novel was a medical student who

122

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

took up the study of physics and
went mad. (Pat has suggested that
there may be a connection between
these two events,* Paul, a physicist,
denies it.) In a discussion with an-
other physician, Wells's invisible
man sums up what makes some-
thing visible — and therefore what
you must change to become invis-
ible. In his words, "Visibility de-
pends on the action of the visible
bodies on light. Either a body ab-
sorbs light, or it reflects or refracts
it, or it does all three. If it neither
reflects nor refracts nor absorbs
light, it cannot of itself be visible."

A LOVELY SHADE OF
ULTRAVIOLET

Before we talk about what you
can't see, you need to understand
exactly what it is that you can see.
Bob Miller, an artist who has built
a number of Exploratorium exhib-
its, says, "You see light. It's the
only thing you can see."

Bob's quite right. You see the
world because some of the light
that's bouncing off the stuff around
you gets into your eyes. Your eyes
bend that light to focus an image on
your retina. The light-sensitive cells
of the retina process that image,
converting it into patterns of elec-
trical impulses that your brain pro-

cesses, and voila — you see the
world.

What you see depends on how
the light that gets into your eyes
has been affected by the stuff it has
encountered before it got into your
eyes. The stuff we call visible light
is a tiny slice of the spectrum of
electromagnetic waves — which
includes radio waves, x-rays, gamma
rays, and ultraviolet light. Differ-
ent colors of light are electromag-
netic waves of different wave-
lengths. Your eyes can detect elec-
tromagnetic waves ranging from 700
nanometers (red) to 400 nanometers
(violet). If you think of the electro-
magnetic spectrum as a piano key-
board, visible light is equivalent to
about an octave. Beyond that range,
there are electromagnetic waves
that you can't see — essentially,
colors that are invisible to you.
(Which is why Pat's favorite color is
ultraviolet. It's a perfectly legiti-
mate color, just beyond the range of
human vision.)

Electromagnetic waves are ex-
quisitely sensitive to the presence
of electrons in matter. Electrons
are charged particles, and electro-
magnetic waves push on charges,
making electrons oscillate. Depend-
ing on how its electrons react to
this push, matter can absorb light,
reflect light, or bend or refract light.

SCIENCE

123

These interactions with light are
what make objects visible.

An object absorbs light if its
electrons oscillate in response to
the light and transform light energy
into other forms, such as heat en-
ergy or chemical energy. Most ob-
jects absorb at least some visible
light. An object's color depends on
what frequencies of visible light it
absorbs. Grass looks green, for ex-
ample, because chlorophyll absorbs
red and blue light and reflects the
left-over green light to your eyes.
Blood looks red because hemoglo-
bin absorbs blue and green light and
reflects red light. Objects that ab-
sorb all colors look black or gray
and become visible against the
bright or colored objects behind
them, just as the coal sack nebula
appears black against the brighter
Milky Way behind it.

To become invisible in Wells's
tale, the would-be invisible man
had to deal with biological pig-
ments, compounds that absorb
light. The main pigments in the
human body are hemoglobin and
melanin. Since the invisible man
was an albino and his body pro-
duced no melanin, his job was easier.
He just had to deal with the hemo-
globin, the compound in blood that
absorbs oxygen. So he discovers a
chemical that bleached hemoglo-

bin, rendering it colorless, while
allowing it to retain its oxygen trans-
porting function.

This is one spot in the story
where physicists and chemists must
suspend their disbelief: No such
chemical is known even today. It
would be more likely to find a col-
orless chemical to replace the oxy-
gen-carrying hemoglobin in the
blood than to bleach hemoglobin
and have it retain its function. And
of course, there are practical con-
siderations: The invisible man could
have stopped here and made a for-
tune with a commercial cleaning
product that removes blood stains
instantly.

REFLECTING ON LIGHT

Eliminating absorption of light
is just the first step toward becom-
ing invisible. Next, the invisible
man needed to eliminate reflection
and refraction.

So let's consider reflection,
first. Some objects like water or
glass absorb so little light that they
are pretty much clear. Not com-
pletely clear — if you look at a pane
of window glass through one of its
edges it appears green because iron
oxide impurities in the glass are
absorbing some light — but close
enough. Yet you can see a clear

124

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

glass window because light reflects
from its surface.

Other forms of reflection make
other objects visible. Clouds and
snowbanks look white because the
surfaces of water drops and ice crys-
tals scatter light. The skin of an
albino looks white because the clear
skin proteins scatter light. Blue jay
feathers, the tail of a blue-tailed
gecko and Paul Newman's eyes are
all blue — but none of these things
contain blue pigment. In all of them,
tiny particles scatter more blue light
than red.

Light can reflect from the sur-
face of a clear material. The light
that doesn't reflect shines through
the material — but that doesn't mean
it's unaffected by the material. When
light shines through a lens, through
a glass filled with water, through a
fishbowl, the light refracts or bends,
distorting the view and revealing
that something's in the way.

So to be completely invisible,
you need to eliminate reflection and
refraction — and that brings us to the
speed of light. Light reflects and bends
because it changes speed abruptly at
the surface of the clear object.

Yeah, yeah — we know. You've
been told that light always travels
at the same speed. Well, that's more
or less true. As long as nothing's in
the way, light cruises along at

1 86,000 miles per second, the speed
of light in a vacuum. But when
waves of light pass the atoms in a
transparent material, they are de-
layed just a bit. It is as if each atom
absorbs a little bit of the wave en-
ergy and then releases it with a
slight delay. That delay means that
the speed of light is slower through
a clear material than the speed in a
vacuum.

The re-emitted light waves
spread out in a circle around each
atom. All of those circles of re-
emitted light add together to make
a beam of light. When light enters a
surface at an angle all the little re-
mitted circles of light add up to
make the direction of the light
change — and the light bends or
refracts.

How much light slows down
when it shines through a material,
depends on the material. When
physicists are talking about the
speed of light in a particular mate-
rial, they talk about the index of
refraction — the ratio of the speed
of light in a vacuum to the speed of
light in a material. In window glass,
for instance, the index of refraction
is 1 .5. That means the speed of light
in glass is 2/3 of the speed in a
vacuum. Since the index of refrac-
tion is a ratio of two speeds, it's a
number without units.

SCIENCE

125

Now it's easy to make a glass
rod disappear by putting it in a liq-
uid with an identical index of re-
fraction. At the Exploratorium,
there's an exhibit where you can
dip a bundle of seven glass rods into
a clear fluid. Once immersed, six of
the rods become invisible; the sev-
enth remains visible. The disap-
pearing glass in this exhibit is clear
pyrex glass. In air, the six pyrex rods
are visible because light reflects
from the surface of the glass and
bends as it enters and leaves the
glass. However,the mixture of min-
eral oils in which the rods are im-
mersed exactly matches the index
of refraction of pyrex — so the rods
become invisible. The seventh rod
is made from flint glass, which has
a different index of refraction —
and therefore remains visible.

If you feel like it, you can dupli-
cate this experiment at home.

Making a glass rod disappear in
liquid is much easier than making a
person — even a transparent person
— disappear in air. The index of
refraction of the human body is
greater than 1.3 and the index of
refraction for air is 1.003. This is a
huge difference.

In The Invisible Man, Wells
overcomes this in the story with
another bit of wild fiction that re-
quires physicists to take a deep

breath and work hard to suspend
their disbelief. The invisible man
discovers an "ethereal vibration"
which he compares to a roentgen
ray (now called an x-ray). This ray
reduces the index of refraction of
body tissues until they are close to
that of air.

THE PROBLEMS OF BEING
INVISIBLE

Unfortunately, invisibility
comes with a few problems. If the
invisible man were truly invisible,
he would also be blind. For the in-
visible man (or anyone else) to see,
the retinas of the eyes must absorb
light and convert it into nerve im-
pulses. If the retinas are absorbing
light, they would show up as dark
patches. If they aren't absorbing
light, the invisible man would be
blind. Perhaps that's one reason
invisible men are so dangerous —
you can't see them to get out of
their way and they can't see you to
stay out of yours.

Of course, Wells's invisible
man matched his index of refrac-
tion to air at a certain temperature.
When air changes temperature, its
index of refraction changes. That's
why stars twinkle (refraction
through layers of air at different
temperature) and mirages appear on

126

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

desert roads (light bending up from
the layer of hot air just above the
hot asphalt). So if Wells's character
became invisible on a hot summer
day, he wouldn't be quite so invis-
ible in the chill of winter. He'd be
visible in the same way that the hot
air rising from a vent on a cold day
is visible.

Of course, if you want to be a
well-dressed invisible person, you
need to make your clothes invisible
too. In Wells's book, the invisible
man's equipment is destroyed be-
fore he can make any invisible
clothes. To take advantage of his
invisibility he must run naked
through the English countryside.
For a while, people hear coughing
sounds coming from an invisible
man with a cold. He also leaves
footprints in the snow.

OTHER WAYS TO BECOME
INVISIBLE

Wells's invisible man became
invisible by eliminating his effect
on light. You could also become
invisible by precisely matchingyour
background, like the alien in the
movie Predator. As near as we can
figure, the Predator must detect the
light coming toward its body on
one side and match that pattern of
light precisely on its other side.

On Earth, chameleons, floun-
ders, and octopi use a variation on
this technique. These animals
change color by changing the distri-
bution of a dark pigment in special
branched cells known as chromato-
phores. The pigment can be con-
centrated in the center of the cell,
letting the animal's other colors
show. Or the pigment can spread
out into the branches of the cell,
covering a wide area and causing
the reptile's skin to darken. The
color change is stimulated by what
the animal sees around it.

These animals tend to match
the colors of nearby surfaces. It
would be a lot tougher to match the
light coming from more distant
sources.

All in all, w^e've decided that
perhaps the best solution in the
world ofscience fiction was usedby
Lamont Cranston, the Shadow.
While traveling in the Orient, he
learned to "cloud men's minds."
(We assume, of course, he could
cloud women's minds too, though
that wasn't explicitly stated.) So
instead of interfering with the in-
teractions between light and mat-
ter, the Shadow opted to mess with
perception in the human brain. As
anyone who has experimented with
optical illusions can tell you, that's
a much easier task.*^

SCIENCE

127

EXPERIMENTS IN INVISIBILITY

You can perform a few simple experiments in invisibility in the
comfort of your own lab — or kitchen.

Disappearing Glass

Get yourself some pyrex glass — such as a measuring cup, an oven-
safe glass baking dish, or, if you've got access to a chemistry lab, a stirring
stick.

Dunk the pyrex in Wesson OiP” and it will become very hard to see.
You can make it vanish completely by duplicating the Exploratorium's
mixture of mineral oils. Get some heavy mineral oil and some light
mineral oil at the drugstore. Put some heavy mineral oil in a clear glass and
put your pyrex into the oil. Add light mineral oil, stirring frequently, until
the pyrex vanishes.

Don Rathjen, a local science teacher, uses the disappearance of pyrex
glass to wow his classes. Don takes a pyrex test tube, wraps it in a
protective cloth, smashes it into pieces with a hammer. The shards are
clearly visible in air. Don pours the pieces into a beaker of transparent oil.
He then reaches into the oil with a pair of tongs and pulls out a completely
unbroken test tube! (He had, of course, put the whole test tube in the oil
earlier.)

You can experiment to see what other clear materials vanish in
Wesson OiP^ or your mixture of mineral oils. We have found that simple
plastic magnifiers sold to children as Bug Boxes vanish in Wesson OiP^.
If you make any interesting discoveries, let us know at
pauld@exploratorium.edu.

Solid Water

You can also experiment with white crystals of "superabsorbent
polymer," available at many garden centers. These crystals absorb hun-
dreds of times their own weight in water and are meant to be added to soil
to give it the ability to hold water.

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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

When you place these polymer crystals into clean water, they swell
up and become invisible. Pull them out of the water and they look like
lumps of jelly. Lower them back into the water and they vanish. They
vanish because they contain so much water that their index of refraction
matches that of water.

Tie a noose made of sewing thread around one of these water swollen
lumps and lower it into the water. Suddenly you have lassoed a bit of
water. Even better, you can lift your chunk of water out of the surface of
the water,*^

Hosn' VI I Ik I v/'itk
cAocoUte. ?s5te:uriZg(X

Mark Bourne lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is working on his first novel in
between writing planetarium shows and doing a few projects for television. His
short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Alternate Tyrants, Full Spectrum
5, and Chicks in Chainmail. Here he brings us a tale of faiths that differ strongly
in terms of whose word is The Word.

Mustard Seed

By Mark Bourne

T ONNELLY'S HAND ROSE

I I 1 high, hoisting the Bible like a trophy.

I J M Her forehead furrowed, and her voice

rose with practiced inflection that
echoed among the rafters and stained-glass windows. Her rhythms and
cadences crested and rolled in waves, well rehearsed after years of roadside
revivals in forgotten Southern towns. Thank you. Lord, for making me
your instrument for one more day.

"Men of Earth are cavorting with creatures who never read the
Gospel — ''

She cast her gaze across her beloved flock.

"Who never heard the Word of God — "

They must hear her words if they were to be saved.

"Who never felt the guiding hand of our Savior — "

She was their lamp in the darkness brought from the stars, ever since
those first faint signals were heard by the Farside Lunar Receiver. And
those first vessels descended from the clouds.

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FANTASY A. SCIENCE FICTION

"Who have no souls, for the Kingdom of Heaven was prepared by
Jesus for Man alone”

Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, she gazed down upon her congre-
gation. A subconscious clock measured the dramatic pause, then her voice
modulated to a preordained pitch. '"We walk not with angels, but with
aliens blind to Man's true gift to God's firmament — our Savior Jesus
Christ!" She thrust the Bible before her like a shield. ”Jesus said..." She
paused to catch the eyes of those before her,- it was an easy haul. ” Jesus
said, 'No one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven but by me'! " She clenched
her eyes shut and listened.

There had been a time, years ago, when the stained glass would have
rattled with "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" ringing throughout the sanctu-
ary. And on Easter and Christmas Sundays (when extra fold-out chairs
were brought in from the Fellowship Hall) the room had been so filled with
upraised voices that the walls might have burst open and flooded the
world with the Lord's holy praises.

Today, though, Donnelly heard the central heating clunk on. Far
away bells in the courthouse clock chimed the hour. Old Ralph Hardin in
the rear pews needed a Kleenex. No more than twenty souls here today.
Fewer than last week.

She opened her eyes, lowered the Bible to the pulpit. Her brow lost its
furrows, but not the thin lines like dried-up river beds. Her voice was
almost inaudible over the heating system.

"Don't forget next Sunday's Christmas Eve candle-lighting ser-
vice. Bring your friends." She despised the dead weight of defeat in her
voice. "That's all." There was no organist to play the benediction and
postlude.

She turned away, loosened her collar, and rubbed her eyes, keeping
them closed longer than she really needed to. The sounds of shuffling
coats and snuffling noses rose behind her. The exit door in the rear foyer
groaned on its arthritic joints, and December's gray chill slid down out of
the Ozarks and brushed the back of her neck. Winter's teeth nipped at
Reverend Ardith Donnelly of the Central Presbyterian Church of Harper,
Missouri.

She turned back to her pulpit to gather up the sermon. Gerald Morris
was peering up from the floor below. The chicken farmer clutched his

MUSTARD SEED

131

overcoat against his belly and stared at her with eyes that rarely blinked;
two eggs pressed into a moist dough face.

''Revem' Donnelly?" His voice, like his brown suit jacket, was thin
and faded.

"Yes, Gerald, what can I do for you?"

"M'mama wants to know when you're cornin' out to the nursin'
home agin. She says your services alwiz brighten her day. She says so alia
time. She's real sick, and the doctors, they don't know how long...." His
voice thinned away to nothing.

She exhaled, then smiled, "The Lord's work keeps me busy all over,
but He and I will be back at the home real soon. Tell your mama to keep
a lookout for us."

He grinned. "Bless you, Revern' Donnelly. Jeannie and me'll have you
over to the house for supper real soon. Thas a promise."

"Much obliged, Gerald." She smiled warmly.

"Revern' Donnelly?" He looked away from her gaze. "Jimmy Don
Ledbetter says he saw two of them Seekers in St. Louis last week. He says
they talked with just ever'body about how glad they was Earth was joining
the Union. Then one of them helped Roy Capehart — you know, the
taxidermist? — fly through the air. Without wings or nothin'l It was its
Gift, it said. Then another'n made colors in the air and music came from
the pictures they made. Said we could maybe do it someday. Ever'one had
just the best time! Isn't that wonderful?"

Donnelly looked down at him. "Gerald, doesn't the Bible tell us that
God gave Man dominion over all beasts through Brother Adam?"

His eyes narrowed, but never blinked. "Well, I s'pose so."

"And what does the Bible say about Satan tempting Jesus with
miracles?"

He looked at his hands kneading his overcoat. "Jimmy Don Ledbetter
says — "

Donnelly shut her eyes. "Gerald. There are new temptations out
there among the stars. The Seekers know neither Christ nor salvation,
even though all you need is the faith of a mustard seed." She replayed an
old memory: a sanctuary filled with multitudes in her spiritual hug. She
had been a pilgrim, a searcher for God's wisdom, sharing what she found
with others. She had been young and strong of voice. And of spirit.

132

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

The memory faded, leaving only the floaters drifting across the
insides of her eyelids. ''Only God knows what is in their hearts/' she said
quietly. She opened her eyes. "You tell Jimmy Don — "

But he was on his way toward the exit, shrugging on his overcoat. The
door whimpered shut behind him.

She knew as much about the Seekers as anyone else in these parts.
Twelve years now after First Contact, dozens of assorted aliens —
"extrasolar emissaries" — were on Earth, mostly in big cities like New
York and Moscow, London and Tokyo, Beijing and Bombay. Their im-
mense ships had followed their transmissions, offering humanity mem-
bership in a galactic trade Union that was opening new markets in the
outer galactic reaches. The world was still knocked cock-eyed by it all.
The cultural elite were declaring it the greatest event in human history.
A new age on Earth. Peace and prosperity. Heaven on Earth.

But no heavenly trumpet had sounded. Just those first signals from
out of Sagittarius, heard only by electronic ears. No salvation had come,
for it arrived not on angelic wings and a fiery throne, but in huge vessels
orbiting Earth and landers descending from the clouds, even in non-
Christian lands. And more were arriving all the time.

She felt betrayed, but she wasn't sure by whom. She only knew that
the invasion was complete. Wal-Mart was selling Seeker-inspired toys
for Christmas. For Christmasl Hallmark's biggest sellers were minia-
ture spaceships hanging from Christmas trees across the land —
"collect the whole set!" Earth would never again know a cosmos in
which Man was adrift and alone. The fruit from the Tree of Knowledge
had tasted sweet.

Donnelly turned her back again, stuffing the morning's text into a
dog-eared file folder. This was the third go-round for this sermon. And the
last.

The rear door complained and a cold breeze scraped across the back
of Donnelly's neck. She sighed, but did not turn around. "Be right w*th
you," she called. She listened for footsteps on the floorboards. Instead, she
heard glass tinkling, the sound a crystal chandelier makes when given a
gentle swing. She turned. The room was empty.

"Who's there? Come out!" The tinkling stopped abruptly, as if
someone muffled all the crystal droplets at once.

MUSTARD SEED

133

At the far end of the aisle, a knobby spike of colored glass reached out
from behind a pew. Five faceted fingers grew at its tip and waved. To the
tinkling of tiny bells, a spun-glass sculpture walked into the aisle.

Donnelly's brain struggled to find analogies. A leafless bush in
winter, crafted by a glassblower. Branches and twigs of fine crystal were
shot through with blues and reds and golds flowing through icy veins.
They reached up from a nest of dew-dipped spider webs where indefinable
hues came and went, blending, shifting, sparkling in the sunlight slanting
through the colored windows.

Donnelly stared across the room at the... the thing, A sour taste
crawled up onto her tongue.

"I must ask you to leave," she said, struggling to keep the surprise and
disgust out of her voice. "Keep your Satan-sent ways out of God's house."

The creature quivered. Two translucent twigs reached down into the
glittering webs. They reappeared and held aloft a meaty ovoid sac. The
bladder wriggled wetly, split open across the middle, and spoke to
Reverend Donnelly.

"Hello. Pardon me, please," it said in a dead-on Missouri accent. "I
wish to talk with God." The fragile-looking thing scuttled up the aisle on
glassy insect legs, bringing the sound of windchimes in the rain.

Standing there with it approaching her, Donnelly felt a familiar
bitterness burn in her chest.

The creature reached the steps at the base of the pulpit. Diamond
glints danced across its surfaces. It raised the sac toward Donnelly's face.
The Talker symbiote's humanform lips smacked open, flashing straight
white teeth. "Please," the translator said. "Teach me to talk with God."

Donnelly wanted to spit. "God listens to our prayers. Can you pray?"
She put as much venom into her voice as a good Christian could muster.

"I have practiced the prayer rituals of six hundred forty-four worlds,"
said the translator. As it spoke, lights like golden fireflies chased through
its master's branches. "I have perceived no response."

"What can you know of God?"

"I have worshipped the deities of many cultures, often at the cost of
emotional or physical pain. Occasionally, enlightenment was gained. But
none offered what I desired."

"Why come to me?"

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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

'"I enjoy the quiet places of your world. Trees. I enjoy trees. I was
strolling nearby and recognized the religious symbol at the summit of this
building. I meditated, then chose to seek out the religious leader here.
That, I perceive, is you. Your species has developed religious expression
with great complexity and ritual. Humans have many god-forms. Perhaps
one has the answer I seek. Perhaps you do.''

The thing tweaked Donnelly's curiosity. The Talker's perfect human
voice softened its master's alien appearance. "What do you seek?" she
asked.

The alien sparkled and its Talker took in a gulp of air. "I am old for my
kind. And an aberration. As a whole, my people dislike travel. We are — " the
translator's lips curled upward in a wry smile, " — home-bodies. /,
however, enjoy the company of other species and have lived for centuries
in many cultures on many worlds. I have experienced... marveis that
cannot be spoken of in your language, which has neither words nor
concepts to describe them."

The Talker frowned for its master. "I have reached the limits of life-
prolongation techniques useful to my species, and now approach the end
of my biological processes. Once I believed that I had experienced the
known universe to its fullest. But the long journey to this galactic arm
revealed many more... wonders beyond my experience. Oh, if only I could
share them with you! But your language cannot convey — " Flecks of light
whirled, changing their hue. "You have no — " The translator's rubbery
features mimicked human frustration well. "And still there are uncount-
able galaxies beyond this one. I fear that I will not live to experience all..."
The sentence withered away.

It stood silent for slow seconds, then climbed the three steps to
Donnelly's side. Crystalline arms lifted the Talker closer. Its voice was
edged with hope and desperation. "I wish to never die."

Donnelly studied the tiny fires and woven geometries of the alien.
This creature hoped for the salvation promised by the Son of Man. Could
it even have an immortal soul? Would God create mind without soul?
These beings sailed the stars longbefore Eve sealed Adam's fate. What sins
did they know, and were now bringing to Earth?

Donnelly remembered the hot smells of musty tent cloth and road
dust, of sweating sinners who wept at her feet and begged for salvation.

MUSTARD SEED

135

She had saved souls by the dozens at each town and farm. Now, perhaps,
a greater flock was being offered.

With proper guidance, this reborn creature and its gifted symbiote
could preach the Word in churches, in cathedrals throughout the world.
Millions would travel far to hear an alien proclaim God's message. And
not just on Earth. Imagine the Good News spreading throughout the
heavens! A million worlds cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. With this
disciple at her side. Reverend Ardith Donnelly could take up the sword
and see to it that Christ died for the sins of a galaxy.

This must be her true calling, the reason God guided the Seekers'
ships out of the darkness to Earth, where the light of Christianity could
dim a million suns. The Lord led this poor emissary to Donnelly's pulpit,
to the one true faith, to the feet of Christ's own lighthouse. If Donnelly's
Earthly flock chose to stray from the path of righteousness, well then she
and the Lord would carve a new path that spread for light-years in all
directions. Thank you, God. Thank you, dear Jesus.

She smiled down at the alien. Her voice was robed in maternal
patience.

"Eternal life is offered only to believers in Christ." She opened the
Book of Matthew. "I'd like to share with you — "

She felt as though her skull had vanished and warm water flowed over
her brain —

— She is a tremendous crystal bathing in cold acid pools beneath the
spectrum-flecked radiance of a star cluster. She sees without eyes and
feels without flesh, and she sings without sound in perfect harmony with
ten billion others like herself on a hundred worlds. She sings of birth, of
hunger and mystery, and of the deepest yearning she has ever known...

— She leaps, joyously laughing, from a cliff of black glass into an
ocean lit by a bloated red giant sun. The hot sea engulfs her, and the Joy
rushes like fire across her front fins, down her long spine, and into her
hindbrain. Broadcasting exaltation to all who listen, she plunges deeper
into the First Mother Who Gave Us Life...

— Buoyant, balloonish, she floats high above eternal storms that stir
the Depths below. The Sky cracks with lightning that would shatter a
lesser world, flashing and branching through the infinite layers of cre-
ation. She waits a calculated interval for the air to slap with thunder. The

136

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Old Winds are angry. It is time to drift higher, toward the tiny glows that
are so far away where the Sky grows dark...

NO! I AM NOT THIS! I AM —

— happy to be needed here inside my God. We help each other, or we
die together. I feel my God's thoughts. There is a minor infection in a main
ventricle wall. I swim there, against a pulsing tide, knowing what to do.
There can be no greater purpose...

— gliding above a new world, beneath a billion suns in the galaxy's
bulging belly. Hard radiations are warm and tingly on my sails. Life is
there, its unique power irresistible. I shall reach out to it and...

/ am —

— making food for my children as I watch them hatch in
silicate sand.

— home from far traveling, telling tales of worlds built on
light and song.

— an artist, sculpting nebulae to express my awe at being
in this Universe at this time.

I AM —

— on the floor, shouting in a large room. The air is cold.

Donnelly found herself on the carpet in a fetal position, shouting

nonsense syllables. She felt as though a cord had been cut, a connection
severed, her brain detached from an infinite communion. She was adrift.
Alone.

She sat up. Her skin felt like someone else's ill-fitting clothes. Every
movement was wrong in ways she could not describe. She was sore in her
arms and legs. And in limbs she never had.

Somewhere nearby, a chandelier jingled in a breeze. She turned. The
Talker was frowning down at her. Below it, crystal webs glimmered
kaleidoscopically. The Talker wriggled. "Many apologies! I did not wish
to cause discomfort. Please forgive. I thought you wanted to share. The
experiences are impossible to express fully in your language."

Donnelly wrapped her brain around a vocal apparatus that was now
strange, unfamiliar. She grunted and focused her eyes on the. ..no, not
"alien" anymore. She was now...

The Seeker stepped closer. "The Gift of my species is a specialized
telempathy. We, I, collect the life experiences of non-self species. We

MUSTARD SEED

137

share these with other non-self minds. This way all life knows what it is
like to be all others. A prized Gift in a Union of many worlds, yes? I wished
you to understand my problem."

Donnelly, or the part of her that was still merely Donnelly, under-
stood. She had sung of mysteries in a cold acid pool. She feared the angry
Winds in the clouds of an immense Jovian world. She had told untellable
tales brought home from far stars. Wave after wave washed over a
flickering flame of belief in... what? Created in God's imagel How could
we have gotten it so wiongl But in each experience, one truth was
common. Life was precious. And too short.

The Seeker stepped away. "You cannot help me. I have shared your
mind. You believe in a non-body self that continues beyond the end of
physical life functions. A common belief. Yet you have no evidence to
support it.

"Also — " The Talker frowned as if it were tasting something sour.
"Your species has thought itself alone in the cosmos. This I have never
experienced. It was not a pleasant sharing. I will carry the memory with
me and share you with other non-self forms. In this way you — " It poked
a glassy finger against Donnelly's chest. Fireflies flew within its wintery
branches. " — may be immortal, in a way, according to your belief
system."

The alien lowered its Talker back into its body. The meaty mouth
spoke through a nest of ice. "I regret that I may not live long enough to find
my answers. There is much to see and very little time."

With the murmur of windchimes, the alien — no, the pilgrim, the
searcher — scurried backward down the aisle. The rear door keened on its
hinges.

A chill breeze ran along the carpet and curled around Donnelly. She
tried to sing a song born beneath a heaven far richer than the barren skies
of Earth. She yearned for something wonderful she could not name. Her
skin remembered the hot embrace of a red sea and the electric prickle of
a stellar wind. The insides of her eyelids, she knew, would never again
show merely darkness.

All it takes is the faith of a mustard seed, she had told her flock.
Lifetimes ago. But a mustard seed tossed into an infinite orchard...

Silently, Donnelly offered up a prayer.

138

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

After a long while, she stood, massaged stiff muscles, and slowly
walked down the aisle to the door. It moaned a last lingering lament as she
opened it.

There were glints of light in the graveyard across the road. The Seeker
was there, studying the ornate headstones. Donnelly wondered if it really
enjoyed traveling alone. It couldn't hurt to ask.

She locked the door behind her and followed the prints through the
fresh mantle of Christmas snow.*^

Linda Nagata recently published her third science fiction novel in as many years.
Deception Well. She lives in Hawaii and says that in twenty-four years of swim-
ming in Hawaiian waters she has never seen a shark (and hopes never to do so).

Hooks,

Nets, and Time

By Linda Nagata

The ocean ran through

his dreams. The panting breath of the
wavelets as they rose and fell against the
pylons became his own breath, a slow,
deep rhythm in his lungs that forced him to run. His footfalls reverberated
against the black plastic photovoltaic field that doubled as a deck: a square
track five kilometers long, encompassing the perimeter of the shark pen.
Starlight glinted off the water,- glistened in the film of sweat that coated
his pumping arms. The rubber soles of his running shoes beat out an
ancient cursorial rhythm, a telling vibration transmitted through the
deck to the perforated steel walls of the shark pen and then to the coral
foundations of the station some twelve fathoms below. Crippled Tiburon
would be lurking there near the bottom, listening, measuring the vibra-
tions in his ancient, clever mind, waiting for the hour when his fins had
fully regrown and his strength was at once new... and old.

A thin wail twisted through the humid night. Tiburon heard it in the
depths and thrashed his powerful tail. The wail grew into a distant howl
of terror.

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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

A faint splash.

Zayder sat up abruptly. The dream peeled away like burned film,
leaving him in another version of the night. He'd fallen asleep on a lounge
chair again, in the open air, on the deck of the Ocean Hazards Collection
Station that he managed alone. The blocky silhouette of the shed rose
behind him. The structure seemed to be an ugly afterthought to the
automated design of the U.N. mandated OHC Station. Still, it served him
for housing, and storage for the shark farm: luxury quarters compared to
the fishing boats he'd grown up on.

Out on the water, the distant lights of a freighter interrupted the
blanket of starlight. In the pen, the swish and splash of a shark fin accented
the peaceful wash of the ocean.

Zayder leaned forward, ignoring the dry moss of a hangover that clung
to his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He listened, unsure if the howl had
been part of his dream. His pulse still hammered in his ears. He'd heard
howls like that before: once as a kid, when a man fell off the shark boats
in the Sulu Sea. And again, one night when Mr. Ryan came to the station.
Zayder had only feigned drinking the cordial that should have sent him
into a drugged sleep. That night he'd watched surreptitiously as a bound
man went screaming to the sharks.

He listened. He thought he could detect a distant, angry voice from
the direction of the freighter, but that was all. And what if he heard more?
What was he supposed to do if he discovered mayhem and murder on the
high seas? Call Mr. Ryan and complain about the neighbors? He chose to
believe that it had been a dream.

Dawn came. Zayder woke, washed his face, put on his running shoes.
Another day. He would spend the morning doing maintenance on the
robotic garbage trawlers that had come into the station overnight from
their long forays into the South China Sea. In the afternoon he would
mutilate sharks, harvesting the regrown fins of the captive beasts for sale
on the Chinese market — the prized ingredient in shark fin soup. So much
to look forward to.

But first he would run.

He set off at an easy pace on the only route the station offered: a 5K
lap around the photovoltaic decking built atop the steel mesh wall of the

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141

shark pen. At high tide the deck was a meter above the water, with the
open sea on one side and the enclosed waters of the pen on the other.

Zayder had run this makeshift track twice every morning for almost
a year. Boredom had been left behind long ago. Now, his mind automati-
cally faded into a passive altered state before he finished the first hundred
meters. Conversations rose from his past to fill his consciousness, insig-
nificant exchanges: a joke offered to college acquaintances in a bar; polite
questioning of a professor; a cautious response to the inquiries of a
government personnel officer hiring biologists for the wildlife refuge at
Morro Bay; and yet another personnel officer, hiring for the marine
sanctuary in the Gulf of California, and another and another, until they all
seemed to be different versions of the same bad news: Vm sorry. You have
an excellent record and your thesis is impressive, but Vm afraid you're
not quite right for us....

He studied every word, searching for some point where — if only he'd
phrased things differently — events would have taken a more positive
path. An absurd exercise. He already knew the point when his career in
marine biology had been lost. It had happened even before he knew what
a career was, when he'd been arrested at seventeen for poaching.

It had meant nothing to him at the time. He'd been working for his
dad, hunting pelagic sharks for a dealer, who preserved the bodies and sold
them as dramatic ornaments for coastal mansions. Zayder's family had
been deep water fishermen for generations. But as natural resources
dwindled, what had been an honest occupation gradually became a crime,
and an arrest for poaching just another risk of the business.

But the wealthy patrons who supported refuges and sanctuaries
around the world didn't see it in that practical light. No refuge manager
would want his patron's newsletter to ring with the headline: Former
poacher hired as field biologist.

It had never mattered how well he did in school.

But he'd come too far in life to go back to the boats, so he'd taken a
job with Mr. Ryan instead. Ryan did not believe in nonprofit enterprises.
When a U.N. mandate required every corporate entity that generated
potential ocean garbage to construct and maintain an Ocean Hazards
Collection Station, Ryan had expanded on the design by adding the shark
pen.

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Shark fins were much in demand and now nearly unobtainable since
the wild populations had been hunted almost to extinction. Tiburon's fins
alone would fetch twice Zayder's yearly wages each time they could be
regrown and harvested, Ryan's select market held the great white shark in
high esteem: no other great white had been reported in nearly five years.
Speculation held the captive animal to be the last of its species.

But beyond the income from finS; the station was useful to Ryan in
other ways. So Zayder finally found himself employed again, master of a
remote world built on a reef in the South China Sea.

The deep blue sky lightened as he ran. The pink fair-weather clouds
that hugged the horizon gradually brightened until they were bathed in
brilliant white. A moment later the rim of the sun appeared above the
water, Zayder ducked his head, his thoughts blown back to the present by
the sudden blast of daylight.

A hundred meters out on the sun-burnished water a black torpedo
armed with a spine of pentagonal fins scudded toward the station: one of
the robotic garbage trawlers being driven home by a combination of the
light breeze against its adjustable fins and a solar-powered engine. Its
collecting tentacles trailed a hundred meters behind it: some on the
surface, some searching out the depths below. Most of them were laden
with a motley collection of old plastics, netting, glass, metal, and organic
debris bound for the station's recycling bins.

Zayder slowed to watch the trawler come in. At the same moment a
white-noise explosion of water erupted from the pen, scarcely a body
length away. Startled instinct slammed him backward as the geyser of
white water lunged toward him. A solid shape appeared as the pearly water
fell away. He recognized the massive, lead-gray profile of a great white
shark, its fins fully grown and its maw open, its upper jaw thrust forward
to expose rows of triangular teeth. Tiburon! Spray washed over Zayder as
he threw himself back, a split second before the five-meter shark slammed
onto the deck. The whole structure shuddered. Fracture lines bloomed in
the photovoltaic panels beneath Tiburon's belly. The shark fixed him
with its manic black eyes. It thrashed on the deck, jaws snapping in an
effort to get at him. He felt the rush of air as the teeth closed within
centimeters of his ankle.

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143

''You bastard!" he screamed. He jumped back again. The shark thrust
forward. Its torso was draped on the deck> but its great tail was still in the
water^ fanning the surface into a violent foam. "'Back in, you fucker!"'
Zayder screamed.

The shark snapped twice more, then grew still. Its eyes still fixed on
him, it slid silently back into the water.

Zayder stood on the deck, his shoulders heaving, a torrent of curses
spilling from his mouth. Tiburon was the oldest, biggest monster in the
pen. Zayder had harvested his fins five times, each time salving the
wounds with a regenerative balm that forced the valuable fins to regrow.
Five times he'd nursed Tiburon in the recovery channels, where pumps
forced a steady torrent of water over the helpless shark as it writhed on the
bottom of a narrow steel chute.

"I'll take your fins again this afternoon," Zayder growled. Cautiously,
he stepped forward, to peer over the edge of the deck. Tiburon was a
skulking shadow a fathom down.

Suddenly the shark turned, cruising slowly out about fifty meters
toward the center of the pen until Zayder lost sight of it. A moment later
Tiburon reappeared, still a fathom below the surface, his great tail flailing
as he charged the wall of the shark pen. Zayder got ready to dodge a second
lunge. But Tiburon had his own designs. He rammed the wall of the pen
with his snout. The blow shook the structure. Zayder stumbled, swaying
to keep his balance. He almost went down.

What the hell was going on? Was the damn fish trying to knock him
off the deck? Tiburon took off again for the center of the pen. Zayder
turned, ready to run for the shed and his tranquilizing harpoon, when a low
moan reached his ears. "Help, man. Help me," 2l tired voice croaked.

It came from the ocean side of the deck. Zayder glanced over his
shoulder. Tiburon had turned. Quickly Zayder dropped to his knees and
leaned over the decking to spy a young man — probably no more than
twenty — adrift in the light swell, a few meters outside the steel mesh.
The sun shone full in his pale face as his bare feet trod the water in quick,
frantic strokes. His dark hair floated like an ink cloud around his shoul-
ders, blending imperceptibly with his black shirt. He sputtered, his eyes
pleading with Zayder for help.

Looking at him, Zayder grinned in sudden relief. No wonder the shark

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had been pumped into a manic state. Tiburon had smelled game in the
water. And just where had this stray fish come from? He could guess. The
garbage trawlers had brought bodies in before — though never live ones.
The trawler tentacles were designed to detect and avoid living organic
structures. But Zayder knew that clothing could confuse them.

Just then, the shark rammed the wall of the pen again. The deck
shuddered. ''Not this time, you man-eating bastard," Zayder muttered.

He dropped to his belly and reached out a hand to the foundering
stranger. The water was a meter and a half below. "Here," he barked. "See
if you can reach me. Til pull you up."

The kid shook his head, his mouth twisting in pain. "Can't," he
panted. "Hands are bound."

Zayder scowled. And who had bound his hands and dropped him into
the sea? Maybe it was better not to know. Zayder didn't want to get sucked
into the personal affairs of men like Ryan.

The stranger seemed to read his thoughts. He closed his eyes, leaned
back farther in the water and stopped kicking, as if waiting for Zayder to
decide whether he would live or die. Zayder cursed softly.

Men like Ryan might have a choice. But he wanted never to be a man
like Ryan. Quickly stripping off his shoes, he slipped over the side of the
deck and into the water.

The ocean's cool and pleasant hand enfolded him, quenching his
doubts. He stroked to the stranger, hooked an arm across his chest and
dragged him along the pen wall, nearly sixty meters to a maintenance
ladder. He tried not to see the huge shadow that cruised back and forth,
back and forth, just a few meters away on the other side of the steel mesh.
But he could feel the kid watching.

Zayder didn't blame him. The mesh wasn't designed to inspire
confidence. It had a gauge wide enough to allow Zayder to wriggle through
if he had to. The shark seemed appallingly near.

To distract the kid, he asked: "How'd you get the trawler to let you

go?"

The kid's eyes squinched shut. Then in hoarse English, dignified with
a slight British accent, he explained: "I was floating motionless in the
water when the trawler took me.... It grabbed me around the chest, and
dragged me. It was moving so fast, I couldn't fight it. I thought I was going

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145

to drown. Then it stopped here. I twisted and kicked until it let me
go. . .why? Motion. . . characteristic of living organisms. The trawler's. . .not
supposed to be hazard to sea life. ..so I suspect motion. ..stimulated my
release."

Zayder began to regret asking the question. Who the hell was this kid?
He reached the ladder, then hooked an arm around the lowest rung, heaved
the kid over his shoulder and climbed out. "I think I can walk," the kid
gasped. Zayder didn't believe him. He laid him carefully on the deck, then
checked for Tiburon. The fish was cruising out toward the center of the
pen again, so Zayder took a moment to check the bindings that held the
kid's arms pinioned behind his back.

He discovered two ropes: one at the elbows, one at the wrists. The
kid's palms were pale and wrinkled from exposure to water. A lacy
network of blood seeped across them from his finger tips. His finger tips?
Zayder felt a chill across the back of his neck. This kid had no finger tips.
His fingers were torn, bloody stubs, taken off at the first joint. "Holy
mother," he whispered. "Who did this to you?.

The kid blinked, an odd look of wonder on his face as he lay on the
deck. "The shark," he whispered in his cultured accent. "I was holding
onto the mesh. My fingers were inside. I didn't see it coming." He turned
his head, to look out across the pen. Zayder followed his gaze. Tiburon had
turned. He was driving hard for the mesh again. "I never saw a shark
before." He smiled in a dizzy, distracted way. "I can't believe how lucky
I am to see one."

Zayder scooped him up and ran for the shed as Tiburon hit the mesh
one more time.

The kid had passed out by the time Zayder got him
inside. Blood oozed from his fingers onto the bedding,
but the severed arteries had closed down and the flow
was minuscule. Zayder bandaged each finger. In the air-
conditioned shed the kid's skin felt cold, so Zayder stripped off his wet
clothes and bundled him in a stale-smelling blanket. Then he sat down on
the floor beside the pile of clothing, pausing only to note the pricey
designer names before going through the pockets.

He found a credit card and an I.D., both in the name of Commarin

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Wong. And he found an electronic device, a black cylinder some seven
centimeters long and one in diameter. It had an on/off button and a
working light. The corporate name embossed on the housing was Guidestar,
a company that dealt in geographical positioning equipment. Zayder
guessed that the device was a transponder, presently inactive. But who
was it intended to signal? He slipped the instrument into his own pocket
as his earlier worries returned. Just who had tossed this kid overboard?
And wouldn't they come looking for him if they learned he was alive? He
gathered up the wet clothes. He should get rid of them, in case anyone
came looking.

He'd started to stand, when he caught sight of the bloodstained
sheets. Damn. He'd have to get rid of the sheets too. And then there was
the matter of the kid himself: Commarin Wong. The name tickled some
partial memory. Commarin Wong. As if he should have recognized it.

The kid groaned in his sleep. A moment later his eyelids fluttered. He
stared at the ceiling for a moment, then he turned his head. His gaze took
in Zayder's face, before fixing on the company graphic on the breast of
Zayder's T-shirt: Ryanco. What little color there was in Commarin's pale
face seemed to drain away.

Zayder felt fear run in harsh prickles across his own skin. He didn't
want to cross Ryan. He should call in; report the incident. He cursed his
shark-hunting youth, and the arrest that had ultimately forced him to
work for human sharks. He cursed himself, because he wasn't one of
them. "Why does Mr. Ryan want you dead?" he asked, his voice deliber-
ately hard-edged.

A faint, self-deprecating smile flickered across Commarin's pale lips.
"He doesn't want me dead," he said, his voice barely more than a whisper,
hoarse from a night of strangling on salt water. "He wants me back."

Zayder resented what he believed to be a lie. "That was you screaming
last night, wasn't it? They bound your hands and threw you off that
freighter, right? Well, you might have noticed, Commarin Wong, they
didn't send a boat after you."

Again, that self-effacing flash of a smile. "That's what happened, " he
agreed. "But you have the advantage of me."

"The name's Zayder Silveira. Mr. Ryan's my boss, and I need this
job."

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147

"Zayder Silveira?'' Commarin shoved himself up on an elbow. 'Tve
heard of you. I read your doctoral thesis, An Observational History of a
Juvenile Great White Shark. It was a stunning exercise in open ocean
research. Tm honored to meet you."

Zayder blinked, astonished at this outburst, and the unexpected
reminder of better days. The juvenile stage of the white shark's life cycle
had been virtually unknown before he'd netted his subject in the Indian
Ocean. He'd tagged the little shark, then followed its beacon for three
months. But his research ended prematurely when it trailed the scent of
death to carcasses entangled in an abandoned drift net. Before long the
white shark became entangled too.

That study had turned out to be the last published account of a living
great white. Zayder had hooked Tiburon three years later, but by then he'd
been working for Ryan.

"Are you continuing your shark studies here?" Commarin asked. He
seemed suddenly invigorated: his dark eyes sparkled with curiosity, his
pale cheeks bore a faint flush of excitement. He seemed to have forgotten
his injuries, his precarious existence of a few minutes before as he pressed
Zayder for more information. "Is Ryan supporting your research?"

Watching him, Zayder felt a flash of anger. He hadn't pulled a man
from the ocean. He'd only salvaged a spoiled corporate brat who didn't
know enough about the real world to appreciate his own jeopardy.

"Yeah," Zayder said, his voice ugly with sarcasm. "I came here to
study the sharks. That's right. Mr. Ryan's real interested in natural
history."

Commarin's expression dimmed. He looked away. "You're right, of
course. Ryan's not interested in natural history. I know that. It's all
money to him." He knotted the blanket in his fist. "That's why I had
to leave."

His voice had descended to a barely audible whisper, but there was
something compelling in it, leading Zayder to wonder if his judgment had
been too harsh. He stood up thoughtfully, and fetched Commarin some
water. "Why did you leave?" he asked, as Commarin drank thirstily.

Commarin lowered the cup. For the first time, he seemed angry.
"Ryan's my patron, you know. He considers me his prodigy. He's sup-
ported me since I was five, the best schools, all of that. I took my degree

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in genetics. It's what he wanted; not what I wanted. I wanted to study
natural history, like you."

Commarin Wong. Zayder grimaced as he suddenly recognized the
name. Commarin Wong was the new star of Ryan's genetic labs. Far more
than a corporate brat, he was a hand-fed prince raised to augment Ryan's
empire.

"That's the expression most colleagues get when they realize who I
am," Commarin said resentfully.

Zayder felt himself backing away emotionally. "I'm no colleague of
yours," he growled. "I don't know anything about constructing geneti-
cally specific drugs — and I don't want to. I'm just a grunt Ryan hired to
oversee his favorite hobby."

"No, you're not," Commarin shot back. "You're the poacher who
took a degree in natural history. A poacher. With a black mark like that,
it's no wonder you couldn't get a real job. So now you work for Ryan."

"You know, you're a real wise-ass."

"I work for Ryan too."

"Sounds like you owe him."

"I'm not his slave. I'm not going back."

Zayder nodded slowly. Hell, if he had any choice, he'd run too. "So
what happened on that ship?"

The fire seemed to go out of Commarin. He lay back against the
pillow. "I stowed away on one of Ryan's ships. It seemed like the perfect
opportunity. But I didn't do my research first. It seems the captain has had
an ongoing problem with stowaways trying to reach the Americas. He
didn't appreciate my presence."

"Neither do I. But why didn't you just tell him you were a corporate
brat on Ryan's A list?"

"Don't you think I tried? He didn't believe me."

By the time Zayder got Commarin fed and asleep, the morning was
almost gone. He dismissed any thought of doing the scheduled mainte-
nance on the garbage trawlers, and instead got his harpoon. It was time to
go after Tiburon,

The harpoon's darts were armed with a neurotoxin that would
stimulate the shark to bask at the surface in a state of slowly moving

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149

somnolence in which it could be roped and winched to the recovery
channels for surgery.

Zayder walked up and down the deck, squinting against the glare on
the water as he tried to identify Tiburon amongst the many shadows that
swam slowly through the mid-levels of the pen. He hoped to take Tiburon
without entering the water. He let his feet pound a rhythm on the deck for
half an hour, but the great white never surfaced. Giving up, he went to the
shed and pulled out his diving gear.

He didn't go into the water often, but sometimes it was necessary. It
wasn't so dangerous. There were only two or three really aggressive
sharks, and he could hold them off with the harpoon.

He was coupling the respirator to the tank when Commarin emerged
from the cabin, dressed in a set of Zayder's company shorts and T-shirt,
the clothing oversized on his smaller frame. He looked drained, but
sound.

He watched Zayder for a moment, but his restless gaze didn't linger.
It scanned the sky, the ocean, the surface waters of the pen. "You haven't
said what you're going to do about me."

Zayder grunted. He hadn't decided,

"You found the transponder?" Commarin asked.

Zayder scowled. "Was that your sissy stick? To call Mr. Ryan when
you'd had enough salt water and decided to be a good boy?"

Commarin smiled tightly. "I'm not alone," he said. "I have friends in
Brazil. They're waiting for my signal to pick me up."

Zayder punched a flow button on the respirator. He noted in satisfac-
tion that the harsh rush of air made Commarin jump. "You're a lucky man
to have a job waiting for you. What'll you be doing? Making lethal genetic
weapons for the other side?"

"No. ril be working on the genetics of endangered species in the
Brazilian preserves."

Zayder froze. He'd tried to get work at a preserve in Brazil, one that
supported a riparian environment that ran all the way to the sea. Sharks
were known to feed in the murky waters of a river's mouth, where the
occasional animal carcass would wash out from the forest. Such a lucky
man.

A gray fin cut the water in the pen, just a few meters away. Zayder

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tended over a hundred sharks in this pen. They rarely attacked each other,
as he kept them satiated on the organic garbage the trawlers brought in.

He watched the fin glide by. He'd learned to recognize each shark as
an individual. This one he could identify by the fin alone. "Tiburon,” he
whispered.

Silently, he laid the tank on the deck and picked up the harpoon.

Commarin must have noted the change in his gaze, because he
turned. His eyes widened as the shark doubled back. It glided even closer
to the deck this time. As it slid by, its head rose half out of the water and
its ancient eyes seemed to fix on Commarin.

Zayder had seen this sort of behavior before. "That's Tiburon," he
said. "The one that took off your finger tips. Sharks pick their victim.
Guess he figures you belong to him now."

"Are they so intelligent?" Commarin asked. He hurried to the edge of
the deck, where he dropped to his knees and leaned out over the water.

Zayder felt his eyes go wide. Tiburon was only a few meters off the
deck. The great fish turned suddenly, his tail churning the water as he
raced back toward Commarin.

Zayder got there first. He grabbed Commarin by his shirt, yanked him
to his feet and threw him back toward the shed. The shark turned abruptly
and descended back into the water without striking.

"You gotta death wish?" Zayder shouted.

Commarin didn't answer. His face reflected fear as he looked out
across the ocean, where the low rumble of a distant helicopter had
suddenly become audible. Zayder darted to the ocean-edge of the deck. He
saw the machine, a speck on the horizon, skimming the waves as it bore
straight for the station. He turned to Commarin. "Looks like Ryan's found
your trail."

Commarin nodded grimly.

"I could try to hide you. But it's useless. If they suspect you're here,
they'll search the station."

"It's all right," Commarin said, his expression suddenly as empty as
the shark's. "I won't make trouble for you."

Zayder could remember the desire. It was not so long ago when he'd
still allowed himself to dream of the great marine preserves off Australia,

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151

off Africa. All he'd ever wanted was to know the ocean, to untangle its
secrets. He would have done anything to be permitted to study in those
preserves.

Commarin shared that hunger. He'd gambled his life for it, on a wire-
thin chance to evade Ryan. And he was about to lose.

Zayder's gaze fixed on the diving equipment on the deck. "Underwa-
ter," he muttered. Then he looked up at Commarin. "They might not look
for you underwater."

Me sent commarin to a network of caves in
the reef, just outside the steel mesh wall of the shark
pen. He had him take the bloody bedding and clothing
with him, because there wasn't time for it to be fully
consumed in the recyclers. "You can stay down for fifty minutes, no
more."

From inside the pen, Tiburon watched Commarin drop into the
water; the shark disappeared into the depths in parallel with the young
man.

Zayder returned to the shed to find the helicopter already down, the
rotor slowing to visibility as the craft bobbed on pontoons a few meters off
the station. The helicopter's doors had been removed. Mr. Ryan liked it
that way.

A bodyguard leaned out from the passenger side to catch the rope
Zayder tossed. Another half-rose from his position in the back seat, his
automatic weapon cradled across his chest. Ryan held the pilot's seat.

After the rope was secured, Zayder pulled the helicopter close to the
deck so the party could climb up. Then he let it drift a few meters out on
the swell.

The two bodyguards ignored him. Weapons in hand, they set off
through the station. Ryan turned to Zayder. He was a big man, thick-
necked and well-muscled like the bodyguards. He stepped into the
building's shade and removed his sunglasses. From his Chinese mother,
he had dark hair and pale skin. From his Caucasian father, he had blue eyes
and the bearing of a shark. "A valuable man was lost at sea last night," he
told Zayder. "The incident occurred near here."

Zayder nodded. "A garbage trawler brought him in."

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Ryan smiled coldly. '"I missed your report/' he said. "Where is he?"

Zayder glanced nervously at the waters of the pen. The smile on
Ryan's face disappeared, to be replaced by a stony frown. "I didn't get to
him in time," Zayder said. "At dawn I saw the great white feeding on the
body. The trawler must have classified it as organic garbage and dumped
it into the pen."

The pale color of Ryan's face deepened to the coppery blush of sunset.
"You didn't try to recover the remains?"

Zayder stared at him impassively. Ryan, still bristling, returned his
stare for a long moment. Then suddenly he seemed to relax. The color in
his cheeks eased and a sly look came over his face. "Bring me the shark,"
he said. "I want its fins."

Zayder started. But Ryan had already turned away from him. He
barked a brief order, and the two bodyguards reappeared from the shed.
"We're going shark hunting," Ryan told them. He turned to Zayder.
"Perhaps we can still recover some evidence of our young man from the
belly of the shark."

Zayder felt a cold flush of horror. "No! The great white may be the last
of its species. If you slit its belly, you'll kill it. You'll kill the species."

Ryan's eyes narrowed. "That would be a terrible thing," he agreed.
"And I would be very upset if I did such a thing, only to find its belly
empty." He pressed his finger against Zayder's chest, then drew a hard line
down to his belly. "I might feel the need to similarly gut the man who had
misled me."

The bodyguards leveled their weapons at Zayder's chest. Zayder
stiffened, but his gaze remained fixed on Ryan's face. "I'll need the
harpoon," he said. It was still lying on the deck, where he'd left it after his
aborted hunt for Tiburon.

Ryan took a step back, then stooped to pick it up. "I'll handle the
weapon," he said. "You find the shark."

Sharks were unpredictable. Zayder had never developed a reliable
way of calling them, except to chum the water with blood. Ryan knew
that. But Ryan wanted Tiburon now. Zayder squinted as his gaze swept
across the surface waters of the pen. It had been ten minutes since
Commarin slipped into the ocean. Tiburon had seemed to follow. Zayder

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153

remembered the fury of the shark that morning, when the pen walls had
kept it from its selected prey. "All right/' he said. "I think I know where
I can find him."

Zayder led them along the deck, some three hundred meters, until
they neared the point above the underwater caves in which Commarin
was hiding. He imagined Tiburon below, listening to the vibrations of
their footsteps, the shark's blood fury roused by the scent of inaccessible
Commarin. He searched the clear blue water inside the pen. Smaller
sharks swept past, their movements quick, agitated. Cautiously, Zayder
crouched at the edge of the deck. He could feel Ryan's presence close
behind him. "Well?" Ryan demanded.

Zayder thought he saw a huge gray shadow in sinuous motion far
below. Come on, Tiburon. You vicious old bastard.

The shadow turned, circled, then began driving toward the surface.
Zayder looked up to see Ryan staring at the charging shark. "He's the last
of his species," Zayder said. "And he tends to hold a grudge."

Ryan raised the harpoon; took aim. The bodyguards moved up beside
him, edging close to the deck, even leaning over, so they could see the
action. The shadow of the shark seemed to grow enormously large as it
approached. Sweat appeared on Ryan's cheeks. 'TVs not slowing downl"
he hissed.

Zayder readied himself. As Tiburon burst from the water, Zayder
dove diagonally across the deck — and collided with Ryan! Ryan blocked
his way — and he'd failed to fire the harpoon. Instead, he'd thrown himself
back, rolling to safety across the deck as the shark crashed onto the black
surface of the photovoltaic cells. Zayder scrambled to escape Tiburon's
snapping jaws. But the shark was faster. He felt the huge triangular teeth
rake furrows in his leg. He screamed and clawed at the deck, slithering
away. Twisting around, he looked back in time to see the thrashing shark
snap at one of the bodyguards. It took the stunned man in its massive jaws
and bit down. The man never even screamed as his spine was snapped.
Then the shark shook its massive head. Blood flew as it dropped its victim.
It turned to the second bodyguard and lunged, snapping once, twice as the
screaming man scrabbled across a deck that was suddenly slick with
blood. Tiburon's maw closed on the man's leg, taking it off just above the
knee.

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Then, as if he'd collected his due, the shark slipped quietly back into
the water.

Zayder found himself on hands and knees in the center of the blood-
washed deck. The wounded man was screaming. The bleeding corpse
shuddered on the deck. His own leg felt as if fiery brands were burning into
his flesh. He choked on the pain.

Suddenly, the bolt of the harpoon was thrust in his face. He stared at
the double image of the steel point as it hovered, out of focus, scant
centimeters from his eyes. He looked past the point to see Ryan standing
over him, face flushed with fury.

"Where is Commarin?" Ryan shouted. "Where is he?"

"Tiburon," Zayder gasped. "I told you — "

"No more lies! That shark has not fed. Where is he? Where is
Commarin? Tell me now, or you'll die. Tell me, because I'm going to find
him anyway."

The screams of the wounded man were growing feebler. He was
bleeding to death while his boss continued to pursue the quarry.

In the pen, the waters were no longer calm. Sharks were gathering,
drawn by the huge quantities of blood that continued to drain into the
water. Zayder glanced quickly at the frothing, whirling maelstrom of fins,
knowing his own death would lie there if he gave in to Ryan.

Tiburon had never given in. Not even after his fins had been cut off
five times, five times regrown in the coursing waters of the recovery
channels. He'd just gotten bigger and meaner; faster, stronger. Maybe
soon, he'd be able to jump over the deck to freedom.

All this passed through his mind in the space of a trembling breath.
And then he made his decision. "Fuck you, Ryan," he muttered.

Ducking quickly, he rolled off the deck. He heard Ryan scream at him,
but the sound was cut off by the water as he plunged into the pen, just on
the edge of the frenzy.

Zayder opened his eyes to the brine. He saw dark shadows dart toward
him. The water was murky with blood. He stretched out his body and
reached for the mesh of the shark pen's wall. He kicked. Harsh skin
scraped his ribs as a shark brushed against him. He kicked harder. His
fingers found the mesh. A gray shape loomed out of the froth and murk.
Maw open, teeth bared, it bore down on him. He jammed his head through

HOOKS, NETS, AND TIME

155

the mesh, wriggled to get his shoulders through. The shark turned and
darted away, its dentate skin scraping his thigh as he pulled himself all the
way through.

He surfaced under the deck, gasping for air. His eyes were closed in a
grimace of pain as he fought the urge to scream. Ryan was on the deck, just
above. But there was so much blood in the water! Ryan would have to
believe he was dead. He would have to,

"Zayderl" a voice hissed, not an arm's length from his ear.

He jumped in shock. His eyes flew open to see Commarin adrift in the
water beside him, still wearing the diving gear, his bandaged hands
awkward as he paddled to stay afloat.

A wave of dizziness swept over him. He could sense blood from the
wound in his leg pumping into the ocean. He could still feel the frantic
thrashings of the frenzy in the currents driven through the mesh. His
trembling hands stroked the water. "Ryan knows you're here," he
whispered to Commarin. "His goons are dead. But he's the worst of
them."

He reached into his pocket to remove the transponder. Sinking deeper
into the water, he thrust it at Commarin. "Take this," he hissed. "Make
your way around the pen until you find a garbage trawler in port. Check
the ready lights on the berth. Find one that's nearly charged. Use your
knife to remove the tentacles, then tie yourself to it. It'll take you a
hundred klicks out by morning if it senses no weight on its limbs. Your
friends will be able to retrieve you safely."

"You're coming too," Commarin said anxiously.

Zayder's lip curled in anger. "Don't think so, Commarin. Tiburon
nicked my leg. Blood's still flowing. I've got to get out of the water."

"But Ryan's there."

"I've dealt with sharks before. Now go. Go! Get out of here. I want to
see Ryan lose for a change."

But Commarin shook his head. "Not a chance. I got you into this
mess. I'm not going to abandon you now. Look, if we can get to that
helicopter, we can both get out of here."

"I don't know how to fly a helicopter."

"I do."

156

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Staying under the deck, they moved around the perimeter of the shark
pen toward the shed and the moored helicopter. A long gray shadow
dogged them on the other side of the mesh: Tiburon. Coursing back and
forth, back and forth, the shark's ceaseless motion focused on their slow
progress.

They reached the shed without incident. The helicopter bobbed on
the light swell only a few meters away. There was no sign of Ryan.

"He was uninjured," Zayder hissed. "He'll have called for reinforce-
ments by now."

The light tread of a foot overhead alerted them. The shark swam past,
turned, swam past again.

"Commarin!" Ryan's voice boomed over the hiss/roar of the swell
rising and falling against the mesh. "I know where you are, Commarin.
Your toothy escort is less shy about showing himself than you are. Come
out, Commarin. There's little to fear. You know I'm a practical man."

To Zayder the words seemed to be amplified, reverberating under the
deck. The voice might have been that of the shark, a dual entity,
inescapable in its reach. He leaned back in the water, conscious of a soft
roar in his ears that was the helpless static of oxygen-starved nerves. Some
part of him knew he was bleeding to death. Salt water splashed into his
mouth. He started to choke. He reached for the mesh to keep from sinking,
but suddenly Commarin was there, buoying him up with bandaged hands,
hissing something about Tiburon. And then: "We have to try to swim
underwater to the other side of the helicopter."

Zayder shook his head, fumbling to find the words to express his fears.
"No good! " he whispered. "Ryan's armed. Even if you managed to take off,
Ryan could still bring you down. Have to get rid of Ryan first."

But howl His mind seemed to be bobbing about on the surface of a
swell. He had trouble focusing on a single train of thought. He felt as if the
trailing tentacles of a garbage trawler had become tangled in his brain,
each tentacle pulling the neural tissue in a different direction.

One tentacle, one direction. Garbage in, garbage out. He twisted
around in Comrnarin's arms. "A garbage trawler brought you in."

Commarin nodded slowly.

"Find one that's charged and ready."

"No. I told you I won't leave without you."

HOOKS, NETS, AND TIME

157

Ryan's voice boomed again from overhead. "Commarin, Commarin,
why so stubborn? When are you going to realize that hiding under the deck
is no solution?"

"Not you/' Zayder whispered. His gaze wandered to the deck over-
head. "I was thinking this time we could go trawling for sharks."

Commarin frowned, but he helped Zayder swim to the nearest
trawler's berth. Zayder glanced at the maintenance panel. It indicated the
unit was charged and ready to go, awaiting only its turn in the schedule.
Tiburon slipped past inside the pen. Zayder was peripherally aware of the
wake of the great fish as he lifted his hand to touch the panel. "You want
to send it early," he told Commarin, his voice barely audible, even in
his own ears. "You press this. But first we take off the tentacles, all but
one."

It was an easy operation. The snap-in modules popped out, until only
one was left. "Unwind it a bit," Zayder said, clinging to the trawler's
housing. "It won't stick to your skin,- only to your clothes." Ducking
underwater, he struggled out of his company T-shirt, then resurfaced. He
took the end of the tentacle in his bare hands. It felt smooth and soft and
only mildly sticky. "When I hit the deck," he said, "you launch the
trawler."

"Zayder — "

Zayder grabbed the maintenance ladder and started climbing, his
steps deliberately loud against the peaceful mutter of the ocean. His head
crested the deck, and he saw Ryan.

Ryan seemed surprised to see him. He quickly brought up the muzzle
of his weapon. "I thought you'd be shark food by now," he growled.

"Commarin's hurt," Zayder croaked. "Help haul him up. Can't do it
myself. Injured...."

Ryan crept forward cautiously. A meter and a half away, he leaned
over the edge of the deck, as if to check whether Commarin really was
clinging to the ladder. Zayder judged it his best moment.

He launched himself onto the deck, hitting it belly first and sliding
toward the startled Ryan with the tentacle held in his outstretched hands.
It wouldn't cling to living flesh. But it would happily wrap around Ryan's
clothed leg.

Zayder threw it against him as he slid past. Ryan dropped the gun. He

158

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

bent down, his bare fingers tearing at the tentacle. ''Now, Commarinl"
Zayder screamed.

But Commarin had already launched the garbage trawler. Zayder saw
the finned torpedo from the corner of his eye, speeding out to sea. Ryan
saw it too; saw the connection that bound him to it. He gave one hard yank
on the tentacle as a snarl escaped his lips, and then the craft yanked him
into the water. Zayder watched him go: dark, fishy figure in a white,
foaming wake.

The garbage trawler would stay out until it had accumulated its
weight capacity or until thirty days had passed, whichever came first.
Given that it had only one tentacle to gather trash from the water, Zayder
knew that it would not return in Ryan's lifetime. He closed his eyes, and
lay back against the deck.

IT WAS the roar of the helicopter that roused him. He
awoke to find himself strapped into the passenger seat as
the craft slowly lifted into the air. Looking down through
the open doorway, he could see the shed, the recovery
chutes, the black photovoltaic panels that defined the pen, the sinuous
bodies of the collection of captive sharks. He thought he could pick out
Tiburon among them. He'd taken the great white's fins five times, and
every time, he'd forced them to regrow.

He turned quickly to Commarin. "Go back," he croaked. "Go back a
moment."

"There's no time! Ryan's people will be here — "

"There, " Zayder said, pointing to the shattered section of deck where
Tiburon had lunged at him only that morning. The bodies of Ryan's men
weren't far away. "Please, Commarin."

Reluctantly, Commarin set the craft down in the water just outside
the pen. "What are you going to — "

Zayder unlatched his shoulder belt and slipped out.

"Zayder, wait!"

With Commarin yelling at his back, he stroked to the nearest
trawler's berth. It was the machine that had brought Commarin in; nearly
half-charged now. Half would be enough. Zayder seized one of the
tentacles, pulled it out of the module and dragged it to the mesh. Tiburon

HOOKS, NETS, AND TIME

159

cruised into sight. Zayder laughed bitterly. '"Looking for another taste of
me, you old bastard?" He waited for the shark to pass, then quickly
wrapped the tentacle around the mesh and watched it take hold. Then he
went back to the trawler and activated it.

It hummed softly for a moment, then sped out of its housing, the
tentacle paying out behind it. Zayder ducked under the tentacle and
stroked back to the idling helicopter as quickly as he could. Commarin
helped him climb aboard. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded,
as Zayder collapsed into the seat.

"Just get us out of here, quick," Zayder muttered.

The tentacle had already paid out to its maximum reach. Zayder
could see the mesh bowing outward under the strain. "Hit it, Tiburon,"
he muttered. "Hit it hard."

The shark seemed to hear him. Or perhaps its carefully cultured fury
alone led it to attack the mesh. But as the helicopter lifted, Zayder could
see the long gray shadow charge the wall of the pen.

The impact caused the deck to visibly shudder. The cracked photovol-
taic panel split fully in two. The trawler lurched forward, submerged for
a moment, then bobbed to the surface again as the tentacle snapped.

Zayder screamed in fury! The pen had held, and the sharks were still
trapped in the artificial confines of a tiny, protected ocean. The helicopter
lifted higher into the afternoon. The dark shapes of the great fish swam in
their ancient, enduring journey, round and round the closed walls of their
sanctuary. All but one.

Zayder saw it as Commarin banked the helicopter. The afternoon sun
blazed on the blue water, but beneath the brilliant play of light, an
anomalous patch of night sped into the open ocean. He saw it a for a
second, maybe two, and then the fish sought deeper waters, its sinister
shape disappearing into the blue.

"It's a man-eater," Commarin said. "It killed two men."

"It's part of this world."

Commarin shook his head. "It's part of the past. It'll be hunted
down."

"I know." And when Tiburon was finally taken by hook or net, the
species would be extinct. No sanctuary or reserve could change that.

Had the notion of sanctuary always been illusory? His leg throbbed

160

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

where the shark's teeth had raked him. "I'm going back to the fishing
boats/' he said.

Commarin looked startled. "No. You're a trained scientist. Come
with me. There'll be a place for you — "

But Zayder wasn't listening. In his mind he followed Tiburon through
the deep, as a fisherman would, a hunter: the original students of the
natural world.

He followed the great shark all the way back to his own fading origins.
There were no sanctuaries in the open ocean — not for pelagic sharks or
for deep-water fishermen. There never could be. But he would go back. He
would fish, until that life was finally, fully played out on the open sea.^^

UK/Pu B u 1 9 MED /\utH0R9 of

TMe Big- bangs theory

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